Helping Communities Build their Unique Civic Infrastructure to Promote What Works for Kids:

Strive has designed a strategic assistance framework that helps communities build on opportunities, solve issues and overcome challenges and hurdles impacting the systems of learning in their communities. Using an appreciative inquiry process to build on the community’s individual strengths, our approach is to act not as consultants, but as partners with communities to expand or create cradle to career education partnerships. Strive brings to the table experienced, hands-on, solution oriented staff, armed with our framework, curriculum, tools, lessons learned, progress, key challenges along with a healthy dose of commitment and a few battle scars to work with communities.

The process for each community begins with an assessment of the community’s assets across the Cradle to Career Civic Infrastructure, which is used to determine where the community is in building its partnership and map out where it needs to go. A customized strategic assistance plan is developed in collaboration with the community and strategic assistance is delivered based upon an individual community’s needs.

Cradle to Career Civic Infrastructure:

Building upon lessons learned in five national demonstration sites, Strive has developed a framework for building what is called the Cradle to Career Civic Infrastructure. The Cradle to Career Civic Infrastructure is the organizational system that is formed within a community to use existing resources to target the needs of every individual child so they have the support they need to succeed along their learning journey.

There are four core pillars to the framework. Each pillar has three specific components that are critical for building the civic infrastructure so it can lead to sustained improvements in student outcomes. To learn about the framework and all of its components, please visit the Strive Framework page.

The reason to establish civic infrastructure using this framework is simple. Most importantly, it will result in student outcomes consistently trending in the right direction over the long-term. Additionally, there are three core outcomes that signal the system is changing:

1. 1) collaborative action is implemented to ensure existing and new resources are focused on what gets results,
2. 2) time, talent, and treasure in a community is repurposed to focus on work that does get results, and
3. 3) a community as a whole begins to take ownership for education results as opposed to assuming it is the role of a few core institutions.