The Future is Collective Case Studies of Collective Social Innovation 2025

Collective action activities Capability Activities Building movementsCreating a shared narrative: StriveTogether creates a shared national narrative about the civic infrastructure needed to ensure equitable outcomes for children and families. Expanding the stakeholder base: StriveTogether’s place-based partnerships commit to bringing together multiple stakeholders, including the public sector, when building their initiatives. Organizing field-level convenings: StriveTogether’s Cradle to Career Network gathers each year in person at its annual convening. They also host policy summits and outcomes- focused convenings. Centring lived experience: StriveTogether’s place-based partnerships centre community voices in their work through a variety of community engagement strategies, including youth and community member leadership representation, gathering feedback and insights from community voices, and more. This ensures that solutions are guided by children and families. Celebrating key milestones: StriveTogether’s network members set measurable goals and then celebrate when they achieve progress attaining these goals. Place-based partnerships work to achieve population-level results as well as close opportunity gaps for specific demographic groups. Strengthening data systemsCreating shared definitions: StriveTogether creates common definitions that drive data collection and sharing, including key milestones on the cradle-to-career journey as well as civic infrastructure as a key concept. Developing shared metrics: StriveTogether has built a framework of metrics across seven key milestones on the cradle-to-career continuum. Importantly, StriveTogether place-based partnerships commit to disaggregating data by race, ethnicity, gender, income, language and special education status. Collecting, analysing and sharing data: StriveTogether hosts dashboards that show real- time progress by place-based partnerships against their goals. Through StriveTogether’s civic infrastructure assessment, network members share their progress with the network annually. Hosting learning communities and building capacityCodifying a methodology: The StriveTogether Theory of Action™ is a proven framework for building civic infrastructure and transforming the systems that shape opportunities for children and families. Capturing and disseminating learnings: StriveTogether captures the learnings of partnerships in case studies, blog posts and videos. They also host a free and open training hub which provides virtual training and tools. Hosting communities of practice: StriveTogether believes that peer learning drives progress, which it calls the “network effect”. Network members are eligible to join communities of practice that are specific to their stage of development and their leadership roles. Members also connect through webinars, virtual communities and events. Consulting, coaching and training: StriveTogether provides dedicated network advisers and navigators, who develop tailored success plans and associated training to help partnerships develop strategies, improve sustainability and achieve more equitable outcomes. Influencing institutionsDeveloping policy recommendations: StriveTogether taps into its network to advocate for policies that advance cradle-to-career outcomes and close disparity gaps for youth across the country. StriveTogether is also in the process of developing advocacy capacity building for place- based partnerships to progress their own policy work locally. Supporting government departments: In some cases, StriveTogether supports staffing within school systems, such as for shared data roles. In a few instances, place-based partnerships are situated in local governments because they are seen as central to municipal and state systems. The Future is Collective: Case Studies of Collective Social Innovation 57