2020 Not a Complete Loss for Postsecondary Education
How cross-sector partnerships strengthened during the pandemic
Dakota Pawlicki
July 2021
The toll the pandemic took on student outcomes is becoming clear, with substantial decreases in FAFSA completion, college enrollment, and year-to-year persistence. However, in the world of cross-sector partnerships focused on postsecondary completion, the pandemic wasn’t a total loss. In fact, some collaboratives made major gains in strengthening their partnerships, positioning themselves to respond to declining student outcomes quickly and effectively.
While we are all looking for good news from what we might generously call “a rough year,” taking stock on how these regional partnerships succeeded and failed during a global pandemic is a valuable endeavor. Prior to COVID-19, most of these partnerships were already well equipped to lead large-scale, community-driven change management efforts, including redesigning education pathways, eliminating student debt, and making confusing workforce and education systems work together. However, in the wake of the pandemic, some pundits forecasted that several of these partnerships would outright close, expecting that individual stakeholders (like schools, colleges, nonprofits, government agencies, and businesses) would retreat into their own organizations to focus on their survival. What transpired was quite the opposite. Rather than turning inward to themselves, they turned inward toward their partnerships over the past year, strengthening their work amidst a global pandemic.
Take for example the FutureMakers Coalition. Designated as a Talent Hub serving a five-county region in southwest Florida, FutureMakers is a collective impact initiative focused on “increasing the proportion of working-age adults with college degrees, workforce certificates, industry certifications, and other high-quality credentials to 55%.” Tasked with bringing together the public, private, and social sectors to improve the education and workforce system, the coalition closely monitors partnership health — the process for relationship-building, stakeholder engagement, data-based decision-making, and the collective leadership necessary to achieve common goals.
FutureMakers’ 2021 Partnership Health Report sheds light on how they strengthened collaboration during the pandemic. Knowing this partnership, it is not surprising to see that 97 percent of their partners said the coalition has the potential to make a significant impact on the region’s educational and economic well-being. More striking is that 60 percent of partners reported that they have “changed their work” as a result of the coalition, mainly through connecting with more partners they otherwise wouldn’t be able to, understanding the needs and barriers in the region, and focusing more on equity and diversity in their own work.
Further, 41 percent of partners have changed policies and practices at their organizations because of the coalition’s work. Colleges, community organizations, and businesses in the region have improved equity and diversity policies, altered their hiring and training practices, and shifted funding to support non-traditional students. These are tangible changes in the education and workforce system that are producing better outcomes, gained by improved collaboration rather than any one federal, state, or privately funded grant program to a single organization or entity.
Florida is not the only place that strengthened their partnership over the last year. In the Midwest, the Indiana Talent Network (ITN) was temporarily converted into a response network to better support regions across the state as they wrestled with the pandemic. Facing daunting challenges around the state as colleges struggled to transition to online learning and businesses and community organizations tried to meet the dramatically increased demand for childcare, ITN stepped in as a learning and resource network to support regional collaboratives around the state.
ITN shifted their Guiding Team meetings from monthly to weekly, co-created strategies to tackle these complex social issues, and tapped into the distributed expertise around the state so that every region could benefit. As rapid prototype solutions were implemented, lessons from their success or failure were quickly (and non-judgmentally) shared with organizations, practitioners, and leaders throughout the state. What typically takes months or even years to collect and distribute, ITN was able to do in almost real-time.
ITN also took advantage of the shift to a virtual environment, creating a variety of ways for partners to engage with one another and make new connections. Their quarterly meetings featured presentations on talent attraction, development, and connection from local and state leaders, giving a platform to these leaders to connect directly with stakeholders from the private, public, and social sectors in every region in Indiana. While other states were quickly building new relationships to get the word out about ways to respond to the pandemic, ITN provided a plug-in, ready-made space for state leaders. More than that, they also created a dedicated Equity Media discussion that allowed ITN members a chance to unpack their perspectives and experiences with inequity in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, ultimately spurring rapid change in organizational policy and practice around the state in real time.
Both cases point to a valuable but often forgotten truism — Money and programs come and go quickly, but relationships remain. Building these trusting and productive relationships takes time, and it seems that partnerships that spent the time focusing on their partnership health in the years past were better positioned to respond to the pandemic together.
There is a lot to learn by examining how these exemplars performed over the pandemic:
1) Leaders retreated to their partnerships rather than their own organization or sector silos. They knew complex challenges could not be solved by a single organization — it’s not a single thing, it’s a systems thing. Funders and policymakers should heed this lesson as they invest in opportunities to make our education and workforce systems more resilient.
2) The importance of backbone organizations was once again affirmed. Kania and Kramer’s (2011) research shows that one of the five conditions for successful collective impact is “a separate organization and staff with a very specific set of skills to serve as the backbone for the entire initiative.” In Florida and Indiana, these on-the-ground leaders knew how the system works and had the relationships to quickly and effectively move work to meet the needs of their communities. Backbone organizations across the country are poised to do this systems-building work and have the staff capacity to respond to complex social challenges. What they need is stronger alignment and partnership from the public and private sectors and more financial resources to sustain this too-often overlooked coordination effort.
3) It’s never a bad time to build partnership health. The most successful partnerships dedicate resources and time to partnership building efforts. There are several tools that can help communities do this well, including CivicLab’s Stakeholder Engagement Process — a model-agnostic framework to improve civic collaboration. Existing partnerships should take time to assess their partnership health, identify partners who may have retreated during the pandemic, and take time to bring old and new partners into the collaborative fold. The FutureMakers Coalition report is one model ripe for replication across the United States.
4) Greater attention and examination of these kinds of partnerships is needed. CivicLab maintains the National Talent Network, a group of nearly 100 cross-sector partnerships focused on improving education and equity at the local and regional level. Among this group are 26 identified exemplars that have earned the Talent Hub designation. These are places ready for investment to lead regional recovery efforts, and they are ready for close examination to garner more lessons about their successes and challenges during the pandemic. Now is the time to support such efforts so that we can recover better and faster as a nation.
Jeanna Berdel and Tessa LeSage provided guidance to ensure accuracy in this piece. Dr. Colleen Pawlicki edited this post.
Dakota Pawlicki serves as Director of Talent Hubs at CivicLab. He and his colleagues support cross-sector partnerships around the country focused on improving the human condition. He also hosts Lumina Foundation’s podcast, Today’s Students, Tomorrow’s Talent, is a keynote speaker at several national conferences, and is active in his own community in Indianapolis, IN. When not working, you can find Dakota on walks with his wife Dr. Colleen Pawlicki and dog Otis, playing the tuba, and riding his Honda Shadow (not at the same time).
