Earlier this week, the Lumina Foundation in association with the Council on Foundations hosted a convening in Indianapolis titled: “Transforming Communities Through Higher Education”. The goals of the meeting were to:
- Provide the opportunity for community foundation leaders to learn about trends, best practices and solution strategies for higher education attainment
- Take the first steps to building a community of practice among community foundations working to increase postsecondary attainment
- Identify the leadership development resources community foundations need to build local agendas to increase postsecondary attainment
After welcoming remarks from, Haley Glover, Lumina’s Director of Convening Strategy and Stephanie Powers, the Managing Director of the Council on Foundations’ Public-Philanthropic Partnership Initiative, Jim Applegate, Lumina’s VP for Program Development gave a speech titled “Meeting the Big Goal – Why, What and How”. In his speech, Applegate shared that “by 2018, two-thirds of new and replaced jobs will require some form of post-secondary education”. He went on to mention that while “we are increasing the urban community and our focus on urban centers… rural communities must work to build their workforce” to prevent the problems in the urban community from increasing. Sharing that income inequality grows along with the postsecondary skills gap, Applegate encouraged audience members to focus on “access AND success”. Applegate boldly stated that, we need to have “courageous” conversations around race and college attainment and closed his speech with an assertion that college is necessary for a strong economy, communities, and nation.
During his presentation titled, “Improving Outcomes in the New Normal”, Jeff Edmondson, the Managing Director of the Strive Network and recent recipient of The American Express NGen Leadership Award, spoke about building civic infrastructure to have collective impact. Edmondson’s three key insights to have population level impact included:
- Building civic infrastructure: from isolated to cumulative to collective impact
- Creating a roadmap of benchmarks
- Embracing a general framework for building a cradle to career civic infrastructure (including shared community vision, evidence-based decision-making, collaborative action, and investment & sustainability), with the understanding that each community is different and requires a personalized agenda plan
Edmondson also shared the statistic that “90% of educational support comes from public sources” and encouraged people to let “good data will drive out bad data”.
CEOs for Cities’ President and CEO, Lee Fisher, gave the keynote speech on the first day of the convening, sharing about CEOs for Cities’ theory of change, our action agenda, and how our efforts seek to realize urban progress. Fisher stated that cities are the biggest drivers of economic growth and that great leaders are the biggest drivers of cities. Fisher also identified humility as the single greatest value a city could have.
Day two of the convening opened with a speech from Jamie Merisotis, President and CEO of the Lumina Foundation. Merisotis spoke about the elements of Lumina’s strategic model, which include: transparency, centrality of strategies, system level change, adaptability/nimbleness, and building public will. Merisotis encouraged participants to take risks that will add value and lead to scale and system level change, and shared that progress in communities (of all sizes) matters a lot, as “communities are fertile grounds for cross sector collaboration”.
The second day of the convening also featured presentations from Tina Gridiron Smith, a Lumina Foundation Program Officer, Hadass Sheffer, Executive Director of Graduate! Philadelphia, Janice Brown, Executive Director of The Kalamazoo Learning Network, and a keynote speech from Stephanie Powers, Managing Director of the Council on Foundations’ Public-Philanthropic Partnership Initiative.
Almost a hundred urban leaders, higher education specialists, and foundation representatives attended this event.