In 2021, Community Science started working with the Wend Collective, founded by James Walton and based in Denver, Colorado. Our evaluation focused on Wend’s Thriving Youth Initiative. The initiative centered around successful models and enabling conditions to help children and youth from historically disadvantaged populations develop the social and cultural capital they need to become joyful, successful young adults who live a life of their choosing. Over the next three years, Wend underwent a series of leadership, staff, and strategy changes. As the evaluator, we had to pivot and adjust our approach, design, and deliverables along the way to stay aligned with the initiative and most importantly, to be responsive to the program officer’s and grantee partners’ information needs. We stayed focused on the importance of the community created by Wend’s initiative, the education systems that the community was working so hard to transform, and the access, fairness, and justice that systemic changes would bring for communities that have historically been underserved and excluded. In the end, we settled on telling the stories of 21 grantee partners whose work in the U.S. and two African nations promotes and advances the idea that learner-centered education can lay the groundwork for education equity. We adjusted our scope of work to develop a public-facing report that grantee partners could use for their own purposes, create an internal-focused report that Wend’s leadership could use to inform their decisions about the initiative’s future, and facilitated three virtual sessions to support peer learning and exchange among the grantee partners. Their admirable accomplishments are synthesized in this report along with several key takeaways, including those below.
Learner-centered education is a key lever for transforming our education system to become more equitable. It prioritizes the needs and interests of students to empower them to be actively involved in the learning process and emphasizes critical thinking, problem-solving, and collaboration skills. Children who are exposed to learned-centered education have the opportunity to develop these skills from an early age, giving them the advantage they need as they progress and mature.
Despite the benefits of learner-centered education, we are a long way from supporting and practicing it. Challenges persist such as insufficient teacher preparation and licensure to implement learner-centered practices, resistance among school administrators and policymakers, lack of funding because more teachers are needed for smaller class sizes, and cultural and societal expectations of the teacher as the expert and authority on children’s education.
Partnerships among grassroots organizations trusted by communities, learned-centered education advocates, and established institutions that represent the education system are essential to create the foundation for collective action. Like any system transformation work, no individual or organization can do it alone. Influential community leaders are needed to shift public opinions and the mindsets of parents, educators, and policymakers. Intermediaries, trainers, and coaches are also helpful for developing the resources, knowledge, and skills of the people who deliver learner-centered education curricula and practices.
General operating support is a powerful grantmaking strategy to help organizations fighting for equity to become strong and resilient. Wend’s general operating support gave the grantee partners the flexibility to do what they needed to do in order to promote and advocate for learner-centered education. Some used the funds to get involved in policy advocacy, some created curricula responsive to Indigenous communities’ histories and cultures, and some raised parents’ awareness about the benefits of learner-centered education.
Besides the findings and key takeaways, our experience with Wend reaffirmed the importance of relationships and scientific rigor as we adjusted and pivoted in response to the unanticipated changes in the foundation. We worked closely with Wend’s program officer, Nora Flood, to continuously align with the ultimate goal for the evaluation — to synthesize the grantee partners’ accomplishments; identify the themes and patterns that were common across their circumstances, experiences, and settings; and provide insights about the challenges and future of learner-centered education to inform Wend’s executive leadership’s decision about the initiative’s future. We also reallocated some of the evaluation resources to facilitate and support virtual discussion around issues of concern to the grantees, giving them space to network and identify opportunities to collaborate beyond and irrespective of the initiative’s continuation. We curated as much information as we could from the partners’ websites to minimize our data requests. Our team also created protocols to systematically mine and analyze the data no matter the source and variability in quality and volume across grantees.
In conclusion, this evaluation taught us a lot about learner-centered education, the fortitude of the 21 organizations, the commitment of Nora Flood to amplify the grantee partners’ accomplishments and hard work, and the gift of relationships that enable us at Community Science to stay on course toward supporting healthy, just, and equitable communities.