Strive Convenes in Washington, D.C.

Strive is wrapping up the first convening of the national Educational Partnership Implementation Network (EPIN) in Washington, D.C. There are currently five cities in the Network that are anchored by urban serving universities: Virginia Commonwealth University (Richmond), California State University–East Bay (Oakland), Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis, University of Houston, and University of Cincinnati.

EPIN is a collaboration of Strive, Living Cities, and the Coalition for Urban Serving Universities (USU) to implement the Strive framework in targeted cities across the country. Living Cities is a philanthropic collaboration of 21 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions. USU is a built on the idea that harnessing the collective power of our public urban research universities can help to rebuild America’s cities and foster opportunity, innovation, and vitality.

The EPIN sites are coming together for the first time for the purpose of networking with each other and to discuss and capture shared learning in the collective efforts to create strong cradle to career partnerships. In addition, a core team was invited to present to officials at the U.S. Department of Education on strategies and progress.

The four tenets of Strive’s work nationally are:

Cradle to Career Partnerships
Engaging executive level leaders is critical to the success and sustainability of establishing a coordinated decision making and governance structure that ensures data drives and sustains educational improvement efforts. Similar partnerships have been attempted, but failed due to not engaging the right partners. A durable structure is critical to survive changes in leadership.

Evidence Based Decision Making
Data abounds in this accountability culture, but little has been done to align data across the pipeline and use it to inform actions that can improve educational outcomes for all children. It is important to identify community level outcome indicators as well as a process to collect, manage, and analyze the data in order to establish a baseline for future progress.

Capacity Building and Collaboration
Engaging service providers and educators in working collaboratively to address priority strategies to advance community level goals are critical. Areas to be looked at are: 1) aligning community level work, 2) facilitating a continuous improvement process, 3) collecting and maintaining data, and 4) managing and monitoring on the ground work.

Investment and Sustainability
Developing a partnership implementation plan with mission, goals, and priority strategies informed by baseline data is vital to improving the system of education in each community. The partnership must address early on the issues of who will invest in the infrastructure and how the work will be sustained as it develops.