Business Aligning for Students: The Promise of Collective Impact

Conflict of interest disclosure Allen Grossman serves on the board of directors of an organization mentioned in this report, the Aspen Community Foundation. He receives no compensation for this work. Executive Summary 2 The National Problem 4 Launching Collective Impact 6 Business Leader Engagement in Collective Impact 11 Collective Impact in the Salt Lake Region 16 Conclusion 19 Appendix I: Interview List 20 Appendix II: Survey Methodology 22 Appendix III: Harvard Business School’s U.S. Competitiveness Project 23 Appendix IV: StrivePartnership Results (Cincinnati, Ohio) 24 Appendix V: Aspen to Parachute Cradle to Career Initiative Results (Roaring Fork Valley, Colorado) 25 Appendix VI: Commit! Dallas Results (Dallas, Texas) 26 Appendix VII: The Road Map Project Results (South Seattle and South King County, Washington) 27 Appendix VIII: Resources 28 1 Executive Summary This report calls on business leaders across America to take stock of their efforts to improve pre-kindergarten through 12 (pre-K–12) public education and commit to an innovative approach called “Collective Impact.” Collective Impact (CI) is a community endeavor that addresses fundamental weaknesses in the U.S. education ecosystem* and, by extension, the limitations of most business involvement in the field. American businesses already contribute billions of dollars and countless volunteer hours each year to public education. Yet business leaders are often frustrated by the slow progress in improving outcomes. Ironically, the way the business community commonly supports education can contribute to the slow progress. Much of business’s support is directed to nonprofit organizations that serve students outside the classroom. The tutoring, nutrition, counseling, mentoring, and other services that these nonprofits provide are crucial for the success of students affected by poverty. But in the typical town or city, each nonprofit addresses only one part of a highly interrelated education system. The nonprofits seldom collaborate with each other, rarely share common goals, and measure outcomes inconsistently. The result is service delivery chaos: Some services are duplicated, others are missing, and great providers do not displace poor ones. Collective Impact aims to change this picture. In 145 communities across the country, CI is emerging as a new process and structure that shift the service delivery system from chaos to coherence. It brings community leaders together from the school district, nonprofit organizations, government, parent groups, businesses, and religious organizations. It keeps these diverse stakeholders working together as they move from planning to implementation and beyond. CI focuses on developing a common set of goals for pre-K–12 youngsters, improving the quality and coverage of services, identifying best practices, and measuring results. These four elements are mostly absent in today’s education ecosystem but are critical for high performance. They make systemic change possible. In many promising CI efforts, business leaders and their employees play key roles. In the Cincinnati and Salt Lake regions, for example, business leaders have been involved since early discussions of CI and have helped move the needle for tens of thousands of students. Collective Impact has the long-term potential to be a game changer in American education. To realize its potential, however, CI needs the skills and resources of many more business leaders. And to contribute fully to CI, business leaders will have to modify how they think about systemic change and how they allocate their philanthropic time and money. This report is based on interviews with 70 business and CI leaders and the first national survey of CI initiative leaders and business participants.** It makes the case for business leaders to get involved in Collective Impact and provides a roadmap for engagement. A Dysfunctional System In every community in America, a host of government programs and nonprofit organizations provide a range of services—from tutoring to mentoring to psychological counseling that young people need for learning but that schools are unable to furnish. Despite the magnitude of resources, there is scant evidence that the needs of the majority of young people affected by poverty are adequately met. As reported in The Washington Post on May 19, 2015, “The greatest barriers to school success for K–12 students have little to do with anything that goes on in the classroom, according to the nation’s top teachers: It is family stress, followed by poverty, and learning and psychological problems.”1 Even if you consider this an overstatement, the reality is that the system for delivering services to meet these needs has changed little over the years. Most government programs and nonprofit organizations operate in isolation and have little or no outcome data available to prove effectiveness or to compare one program’s results with those of another.2 This lack of data makes it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for business leaders and others to know how to allocate their resources efficiently. Money can go just as easily to organizations with “good stories” but little impact as to highly effective organizations. *The education ecosystem is the community of stakeholders that affect a student’s development, either directly or indirectly. This includes the school district, nonprofit organizations, and government agencies that provide the programs—from nutrition to tutoring—that enable young people to learn. It also includes parents, the business community, and faith-based and political leaders. Please see The Brink of Renewal: A Business Leader’s Guide to Progress in America’s Schools at www.hbs.edu/competitiveness for more information. **See Appendix I for a list of people interviewed for this report. Harvard Business School surveyed initiative leaders involved in education-related Collective Impact organizations and the business leaders who served on their leadership councils in March 2015. See Appendix II for a description of the survey methodology. 2 Complicating the issue, most communities suffer from an overabundance of nonprofit service providers. There may be multiple programs to address one need, but none to address others. In 2013 alone, the number of nonprofit organizations providing services to young people—from cradle to career— increased by 7%, to over 89,000.3 As noted by Keith Burwell, president of the Toledo Community Foundation and one of the founders of Toledo’s Collective Impact initiative, Toledo had a nonprofit infrastructure that rivaled many other Midwestern cities, but our city had only half the population of most of the others. For example, there were over 60 different tutoring programs across the county, many bumping into each other in the same school, and one didn’t even know the other existed. We were adamant that we didn’t need more organizations providing more programs, but instead we needed to determine what was working and align these programs to produce even better results. The same situation exists in communities across America— too many government programs and nonprofit organizations working independently, with few if any shared goals, service redundancies existing alongside service gaps, and inadequate means to measure effectiveness. What results is a form of service delivery chaos. This disarray has prevailed for decades. Viable ideas for ameliorating it were few and far between before the advent of Collective Impact. Collective Impact: A Response to Service Delivery Chaos Collective Impact fundamentally changes the way essential services are delivered to young people living in poverty. Collective Impact began in the early 2000s and was formally described and named by John Kania and Mark Kramer in their 2011 Stanford Social Innovation Review article, “Collective Impact.” As applied to education, the idea is relatively simple: The rate of educational improvement will accelerate, particularly for students living in poverty, if the numerous service providers in a community delivering programs from “cradle to career” work together and in partnership with the school district to align their activities around a set of agreed-upon goals, use metrics to make decisions and determine progress, and identify and implement best practices. CI in education is relatively new to the scene, but it is in various stages of development in 145 communities. In a number of communities where Collective Impact has made impressive gains, business leaders have been engaged in virtually every step of the journey, from planning CI to implementing it. Business engagement with education-related nonprofits is not new. For decades business has supported education nonprofits with significant time and money. However, despite this support and the contributions of philanthropy and government at all levels, a large number of American youth are not making adequate progress. Business leaders have joined others in voicing deep frustration and have called for more fundamental systemic changes. Over the years, there have been many attempts to transform the education ecosystem, but in the end, little has changed. Collective Impact has the potential to rewrite this narrative. Perhaps for the first time, business leaders have valid reasons to believe that the education ecosystem in their communities can be transformed and that they can play an important role. Business leaders we interviewed commit to CI because they feel: • satisfaction that they are involved with a well-organized approach for changing the education ecosystem, rather than the frustration of treating the symptoms of the problem; • pride that they are giving opportunities for a large number of young people to succeed in life; • gratification that they are helping to create a skilled workforce well into the future; • comfort that they are not acting in isolation but are part of a broad-based and sustainable community effort. For example, eight years ago, leading members of the corporate community in greater Cincinnati, concerned with the lack of improvement in their community’s public education system, helped launch one of the first Collective Impact initiatives and they remain active members of the initiative’s leadership team today. Cincinnati’s results in five key education indicators are encouraging and are receiving a great deal of national attention: The number of children ready for kindergarten is up 13 percentage points; reading proficiency in 4th grade has increased by 21 percentage points; 8th grade math proficiency has improved by 24 percentage points; high school graduation rates are up by 14 percentage points; and post-secondary enrollment has increased by 11 percentage points.* (See Appendix IV.) This report is designed for business leaders who want to understand better: • why education ecosystem change is essential; • what Collective Impact is and what it might achieve; and • how they can get involved in existing Collective Impact initiatives or start new ones in their communities. *While the trajectory is up for most indicators, gains are not consistent across all indicators and may even show a decline in any given year or over time. Aligning for Students: Business and the Promise of Collective Impact 3