| Notes |
StriveTogether
Concern about alarmingly low education and economic statistics led a group of college presidents, business, and foundation executives and leaders of school districts and
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community-based organizations in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky to come together beginning in 2003 to strengthen the skills of the local workforce so the region could compete in the global economy. These leaders soon concluded that to be successful in this endeavor, they would need to deal with the entirety of students’ developmental and educational trajectory, and not just high school and college completion issues. They created the Strive Partnership, bringing together hundreds of community representatives from the school districts and business, and nonprofit groups with a shared goal of improving students’ educational outcomes.
To put the plan into action, they agreed to pursue five academically focused goals that together they deemed a “Student Roadmap to Success.” These goals included kindergarten readiness, supporting students inside and outside of school, providing academic help, encouraging high graduation and college enrollment, and successful college completion (Bathgate et al., 2011; Edmondson & Zimpher, 2014). The Roadmap provided all involved with a picture of the end goals of the enterprise and of the work needed to achieve them, beyond their individual perspectives.
The group agreed that the first priority should be to delineate goals and measures that would give them a concrete means for measuring whether their collective actions were actually having an impact (Edmondson & Zimpher, 2014). Organizationally, through executive leadership convenings and follow-up committee meetings, each partner accepted a specific role and contribution to meeting the benchmarks and indicators set by the group. Based on the data, the partnership leaders would then tailor future efforts, identifying services or programs that were proving essential and dropping those that were proving less productive. An administrative staff, originally comprised of employees on loan from the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, Proctor and Gamble, and other partners coordinated the work and led the partners through a planning process to help them contribute to the joint goals (Bathgate et al., 2011). |