Why Students Should Volunteer – and How to Motivate Them to Participate

Successfully Building Outcome-oriented Community Partnerships

Giving Compass' Take: · Writing for Ballmer Group, Jeff Edmondson talks about the StrivePartnership and how the StriveTogether approach allows communities to collaborate and create solutions to their hardest challenges.  · Why is it important for a community to come together to develop solutions for local challenges? How can philanthropists support community engagement and development? · Here's more on StriveTogether and quality collective impact. In 2006, more than 300 local organizations in the Cincinnati and northern Kentucky area came together to improve outcomes for the children in their community. The StrivePartnership included leaders from education, business, nonprofit, and civic communities who set a goal of creating greater equity, especially for children of color. Together they selected milestones and tracked progress against key indicators across life stages. After the first five years, nine percent more children were ready for kindergarten, for example, and college enrollment had jumped 10 percent. By 2010, the lessons learned translated into a method for building outcome-oriented community partnerships – different sectors coming together to use data to make decisions around measurable results with equity as the overarching north star. Other communities embraced the method and worked to turn it into a framework that became the foundation for a broader national network. Now StriveTogether has engaged nearly 70 community partnerships that reach more than 13 million children. Over half of these children – almost 9 million – are children of color. At Ballmer Group, we believe communities are the agents of change. Our approach is to support organizations that work to integrate all systems in a community needed to improve results, especially for people of color and families living in poverty. We invested in StriveTogether in 2017 to help them provide more resources to communities they have identified as working particularly well. Read the full article about StriveTogether by Jeff Edmondson at Ballmer Group.