Five years ago, StriveTogether embarked on a journey to measurably improve education for every child by bringing rigor and alignment to how people in different sectors work together. At a time when many were claiming to drive collective action and collective impact, we engaged the most advanced community partnerships in the Cradle to Career Network…
I just returned from Salt Lake City after a few days at the Winter Innovation Summit listening to policymakers, funders, nonprofits and social entrepreneurs explore the future of social innovation. This experience brought to mind a blog by Jeff Edmondson about “creating a marketplace for results” where he challenged investors to put results at the…
2017 was a very big year for StriveTogether and the years ahead promise to be even more exciting. I am both thrilled and humbled to be able to lead the Cradle to Career Network into this next phase of our work together. I spent some time at the end of last year reflecting on what…
Six months after becoming an independent nonprofit, StriveTogether has launched a bold and ambitious plan for building stronger systems for better outcomes. Our vision — Every Child, Cradle to Career — has been clear since the beginning, when the local partnership in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky began to take shape in 2006. Since then, change…
Recently I’ve talked with several Cradle to Career Network partnerships that are considering spinning out from their parent organizations to become independent 501 (c)(3) organizations. As I just spent the last year of my life working on the spin out of StriveTogether and have more than a few gray hairs as a result, I decided…
Earlier this month, Parv Santhosh-Kumar and I had an incredible opportunity to gather together with 35 social sector leaders and spend three days at the Skid Row School for Large-scale Change. The experience was transformative. For one, it came at the end of what has been a year filled with high highs and low lows.…
Earlier today, I was reviewing sight words with my kindergartner and as we made our way down the list, she kept having trouble with one word in particular. She became very frustrated and wanted to quit, which lead to my panic thinking she wasn’t demonstrating self-efficacy, grit, perseverance or many of the very important social…
Last month, The Greater Cincinnati Foundation (GCF) and FSG Social Impact Advisors (FSG) published a series of blogs in the Stanford Social Innovation Review on “Understanding the Value of Backbone Organizations in Collective Impact” in which they shared their insights about the work of six backbone organizations in the Greater Cincinnati area. A must read for…