At the highest point of the bridge, they were joined by their counterparts from Northern Kentucky who had walked north to meet them. The purpose of this founding event of StrivePartnership was to demonstrate the participants’ shared commitment to a collective strategy to improve educational outcomes for children on both sides of the river from cradle to career.
The extraordinary display of institutional collaboration soon became a national model for “collective impact” that continues to drive regional educational strategies nationwide. Over the past 10 years, measurable improvements have been made in all six indicators along StrivePartnership’s cradle-to-career continuum.
Despite this tremendous progress, it has not been dramatic enough to ensure lifelong success for all children in our region. Most notably, achievement levels for children of color and children from low-income homes and neighborhoods are appreciably less than for auent, white children. As StrivePartnership enters its second decade, we are committed to advancing the next level of collective impact by fortifying the urban education ecosystem in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky to ensure racial and economic equity.
To accomplish this, we are pursuing a more comprehensive notion of collective impact that draws upon the insights and authority of these community-based stakeholders – including parents and caregivers, teachers, grassroots leaders, and students themselves – and actively enlists them in the co-design and co-production of solutions. We believe that the infusion of these community assets with institutional resources and expertise that StrivePartnership has traditionally mobilized is essential to achieving truly equitable and transformational change on behalf of all children.
