The following resources might be helpful to school districts and the community partners who work with them.

Achieving Collective Impact: Community School Strategies for a Suburban Environment  WeGo Together for Kids (hereinafter, WeGo Together) is a community collaboration established in 2005. The collaboration began with 14 partners across DuPage County, Illinois. Today, over 60 partners come together to work toward a vibrant and engaged community where children and families are reaching their fullest potential in West Chicago, a small suburb of 27,000, approximately 35 miles west of Chicago. WeGo Together facilitates the community school work happening in West Chicago Elementary School District 33. District 33 serves approximately 4,500 students, of which 80 percent are Hispanic. Fifty-three percent of all students are English language learners and 57 percent have low income (Illinois State Board of Education, 2017). District 33 has a birth-to-three home visiting program, three preschool sites,…

Engaging Boards and Trustees in Strategic Learning  Effecting social change in a rapidly changing political environment and an increasingly interconnected world requires foundations to adopt a learning orientation. Without continuous learning, grantmakers—and thus boards and trustees—are unaware about what is working where, with whom, and why, as well as what changes or refinements are needed in order to achieve the grantmakers’ desired results.  Researched and written in collaboration with GEO, this toolkit provides a fresh set of resources for grantmaker CEOs, evaluation staff, and senior leaders to use to engage their boards and trustees in conversations about the importance of strategic learning in their decision-making and deliberation processes.

To Impact Millions, the Social Sector Needs to Scale Scaling Up argues that “without bringing more rigor and resources to scaling impact efforts, the do-good industry will never make the exponential leaps needed to bring social innovations to millions of people.”

How End-User Feedback Can Become a Non-Profit’s Innovation Engine uses a healthcare industry example to demonstrate how institutionalizing the practice of gathering end-user and partner feedback can produce important systemic changes, including the evolution of business models.