Civic Infrastructure

Quality Benchmarks for Cradle to Career Collective Impact

April 23, 2026

When the Collective Impact article appeared in the Stanford Social Innovation Review back in early 2011, our phones began ringing off the hook with communities wanting to learn more about the work of building cradle to career civic infrastructure. Thanks to support from Living Cities we had already worked to capture lessons and work with other [...]

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The Challenge of Funding the Backbone

March 4, 2026

As we work with sites across the country to build cradle to career civic infrastructure, we are learning a great deal about how communities are overcoming both the adaptive issues that are so fundamentally critical for changing culture to align limited resources and the technical solutions for improving supports for children on the ground. Perhaps [...]

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We Can’t Be Program Rich and System Poor

January 24, 2026

Jeff Edmondson, Managing Director of Strive, is guest blogging for Forbes about how we can make smarter social investments. In the second post of this series, he shares how we cannot program our way to better educational outcomes for students. To read the full blog post click here: http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashoka/2013/01/24/make-smarter-social-investments-we-cant-be-program-rich-and-system-poor/    

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Pushing High Achieving, Low Income Students to Competitive Colleges is Critical

December 19, 2025

A new study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University and Christopher Avery of Harvard University highlights how low income students with high academic ability never apply to a single competitive college. We need to be sure that the high achieving, low income students in our high schools are being encouraged to apply to competitive colleges. [...]

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Head Start Report Recommendations Aligned with Cradle to Career Collective Impact

December 5, 2025

The Advisory Committee on Head Start Research and Evaluation, established two years ago, recently released an outstanding final report containing recommendations for the future of the federal Head Start and Early Head Start programs. U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius lays out 3 broad recommendations: a data-driven focus on school readiness and [...]

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What If We Invested As Much Analysis In Our Kids As We Do Our Stocks?

November 19, 2025

Jeff Edmondson, Managing Director of Strive, is guest blogging for Forbes about how we can make smarter social investments. In the first post of this series, he shares the idea behind Strive and building the cradle to career civic infrastructure needed to make disciplined decisions about the investment of precious educational resources. To read the full [...]

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Strive and Promise Neighborhoods release Strategies for Alignment

October 4, 2025

Strive and the Promise Neighborhoods Institute have recently released a white paper on strategies for aligning these two education efforts in communities across the country. The paper explores the similarities and differences between these two initiatives, offers a visualization of what alignment could look like, outlines the potential benefits for both efforts, and then delves into [...]

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Kalamazoo Promise: An Inspiring Story, an Important Social Experiment

September 18, 2025

The story of the Kalamazoo Promise is utterly inspiring. It’s a story about the power of community to dramatically alter the future of its children. It’s a story about giving students and families, regardless of income or history, the opportunity to hope. It’s a story about a city’s aspiration to build itself up by investing, [...]

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The Relationship Between Collective Impact and Civic Infrastructure

September 4, 2025

In an article recently published by Community Investments Magazine, Jeff Edmondson and Nancy Zimpher delve into one of the most popular concepts in the social sector (Collective Impact) and one of the lesser understood (Civic Infrastructure). Gaining momentum at an incredible pace, the concept of Collective Impact has infiltrated our world. Communities across the country want [...]

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What is this Civic Infrastructure?

August 13, 2025

“We are building the civic infrastructure necessary to support every child from cradle to career.” Well, that sounds pretty fantastic, but what does that actually mean? At Strive, we have defined ‘Civic Infrastructure’ as: A way in which a region or community comes together to hold itself collectively accountable for implementing their own unique cradle [...]

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