Transitions

I completed my summer internship on Friday afternoon and flew back to Cambridge last night. Still not fully re-settled back in my apartment and beginning work tomorrow as an Orientation Advisor for the incoming MPP1s, I haven't had much time to fully reflect on the summer and its impact.

I feel honored to have had the opportunity to serve the White House Council for Community Solutions for the past eleven weeks, and I'm indebted to the Women and Public Policy Program and the Adrienne Hall Fellowship for their generous support, especially in cultivating a community of incredible women doing important work across the globe.

Working with the Council deepened my content knowledge about programs and networks of interventions that support youth who are disconnected or at risk of becoming disconnected from education and the workforce; about the imperative of service and civic engagement as strategies in catalyzing community development; and about the promise of cross-sector collaboration in rebuilding isolated and fragmented parts of communities. The Council also taught me a great deal about the politics of decision-making; about using strategies of negotiation and crisis management; and about the ebb and flow of progress in the unyielding global struggles to alleviate poverty, rebuild communities, and prepare the next generation of young people to be educated, productive, and engaged citizens of the world.


As the summer comes to a close, and as I reorient myself to my neighborhood (and reminisce that it was today one year ago that I moved to Massachusetts for the first time!), I'll say goodbye for now, for I'm sure that for the next nine months my life will be consumed by my coursework, my classmates, my second-year policy project, my work with the Student Public Service Collaborative, and other exciting adventures. Thanks for following my summer's work!

$173,000,000,000.00

In 2010, volunteers served 8.1 billion hours, which has a low estimated value of $173 billion.

This morning, the Corporation for National and Community Service released the latest data available on Volunteering in America. The website, updated annually, hosts the most comprehensive set of data on volunteering and national service in America, with some pretty interesting trends and demographics at the national, state, and local level.

Some highlights:

• In 2010, 8.3 million Young Adults dedicated 844 million hours of service to communities across the country -- this amounts to just 21.9 percent of young people, ages 16 to 24.
• The District of Columbia has an average annual volunteer rate of about 30 percent.
• The Twin-Cities win for having the highest proportion of residents volunteer of the 51 largest US cities -- a rocking 37.1 percent.
• 29.3 percent of women volunteered in 2010, compared to 23.2 percent of men.

The site profiles how volunteers help solve community issues through public-private partnerships and community-based organizations. These spotlighted examples amplify the founding principles of the White House Council for Community Solutions -- that all across America, individuals and community groups are finding solutions to local problems, and that every American community can create the civic infrastructure or local road map to drive significant progress on any community challenge.

An NU professor of mine always repeats the mantra, "Think globally. Act locally." Indeed, as models like Cities of Service continue to scale-up, I expect that next year's volunteering statistics will be even higher. The Cities of Service focus on “impact volunteering" -- strategies that target community needs, use best practices, and set clear outcomes and measures to gauge progress -- is particularly exciting. The philosophy moves beyond simply doing service to do a good deed and instead considers service as a mutually beneficial activity that leverages an individual's assets and strengths to address local community needs.

Is your city a city of service?

From good intentions to great impact

Over the weekend, a teacher-friend of mine from Chicago and I stopped by the Save Our Schools march/rally/festival that was taking place in the Ellipse at the White House. We didn't stay for very long, but we were both puzzled by how rapidly polarizing the rally was. A few of the guiding principles of the march -- demanding equitable funding for all schools and community leadership in local school decision-making -- are  worthy of support and noble in theory, but the words thrown around with derision towards data ("end testing now!" and "no federal competitive funding!") were unsettling.

The fatalistic rhetoric that our schools need "saving" and that joy and creativity are dead are far-fetched. I know that protests and rallies have their purpose (and, sure, I've participated in many myself!), but I couldn't help but wonder what this throng of people was gearing up for. Parents and teachers advocating for more community involvement in Washington? Posters blaming Arne Duncan and Barack Obama don't really accomplish much. Angry fear-mongering rhetoric clouds the real message that improving education is a national imperative, and reform ideas can percolate both downwards from the federal government and national organizations and upwards from local communities. First, though, the national conversation on education reform must move beyond ideologies, finger-pointing and false dichotomies. This CLASP piece on task forces on poverty and opportunity gives me hope that state-level efforts to move new ideas can have great impact.

This morning, I had the pleasure of meeting Dorothy Stoneman, founder and president of YouthBuild, a comprehensive support program in communities across the country for low-income young people to work towards connecting to education and the workforce. She is an incredible advocate in the arenas of youth development, civic engagement, and service-learning, and it was wonderful being able to sit down with her and speak candidly about this work. She expressed the growing tension between supporting programs that work and attempting to shift systems towards equilibrium change. Obviously, it's not an either/or question, but in the same way that prevention and intervention must be balanced, programs and systems must be balanced as well.

It's the economy, stupid.

With the debt ceiling deadline looming and in these generally harsh fiscal times, specific domestic policy issues don't generally get a lot of traction. The way to capture the attention of the American public, it seems, is by telling a good story.

Last night, I had the opportunity to attend an informal discussion with Racquel Russell, Special Assistant to the President for Mobility and Opportunity at the Domestic Policy Council. She spoke very briefly about her work on a range of issues at the White House related to widening the social safety net and improving systems supporting children and families, but she spent the majority of the session answering questions. The main takeaway seemed to be about messaging. In this economic climate, we have to get creative about funding -- leveraging public-private partnerships has the opportunity to multiply investments in an unprecedented way. At the end of the day, though, telling the right stories well is an important part of how to change the way we think about any issue.

NPR has been running a short series this week on how school dropout rates add to the nation's fiscal burden. The story is familiar to anyone in the field: failing to address the dropout crisis costs taxpayers billions of dollars in lost wages, increased use of social services like health care and welfare, and higher incarceration costs -- not to mention the more intangible costs to personal well-being, community connectedness, and overall civic health. Inaction is perilous, yet little has changed. The features highlight stories of the faces behind the numbers.

Whichever philosophy you prefer -- whether to focus on helping those who are already disconnected from education and the workforce (intervention) or those who are at risk of becoming disconnected (prevention) -- the message is plainly and simply that we have an economic imperative to address community challenges that are leaving behind so many young people every year, costing them and the nation billions of dollars.

Earlier this week, the Task Force on Job Creation highlighted youth unemployment as a key area to address the jobs crisis. One of the pull-quotes in the report rings true to the relevance of the Council's near-term focus on disconnected youth: 

Young people who do not have a successful work experience by age 25 are at a greatly increased risk of lifelong poverty.

Commentary this week by Algernon Austin in the Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity only reiterates this point:

Once youth get into the habit of working, they become less likely to stop. Making an investment in teens now will ensure they have a better chance of continuing to work throughout their lifetimes.

The quantitative case to the nation has been made, and reiterated again. The qualitative case to the nation has been made, and reiterated again. The question remains to be seen whether community leaders will act on this message and do their part to support this so-often forgotten population with untapped potential.

Totally unashamed of my giddiness...

This evening, thanks to one of my wonderful CNCS/WHCCS colleagues, I got to go bowling at the White House!

The Bowling Alley is underneath the EEOB,
but that's the West Wing!

The entrance to the bowling alley.

The backdrop of the two lanes has a a pretty awesome illustration
of fireworks behind the White House. There are also photographs
of Presidents and First Ladies playing all around the room.

Take a step back and refresh everything.

It's absurdly hot in DC this week. Looking out of the window from one our office rooms, I felt bad for the construction workers outside somehow working through the midday heat. Meanwhile, I was inside all day.

Since I work in an office, there aren't usually that many things to document in images. When I'm not at my computer, what I'm looking at is usually something like this --- scrawled notes on Corporation for the National and Community Service stationery with my Global Engagement Summit "engage." water bottle nearby [and more often than not, an unnecessarily purchased chai].

The first item on my work calendar this morning was a "Whiteboard Brainstorming Session" with the Executive Director and the four of us who support her. As a follow-up from last week's public conference call where the Council presented its proposed interim recommendations to the White House, we started to work on delineating a clearer and more detailed work plan that would outline the work that the Council could accomplish to support the interim recommendations. In doing so, we realized that we needed to rethink (again?) how the various ideas were organized and what the broader umbrella announcement / recommendation / big idea really is.

Thus, the brainstorming session.

Four hours, a few bagels, and many iterations later, we ended up with this:

And then we turned that into understandable words.

One hand knowing what the other is doing

I surprisedly ran into a former classmate while waiting for the bus this morning. When I told her that I'm supporting the Council's work, she asked me whether I work with the other White House Councils (two of our classmates work on the White House Council on Environmental Quality). Funnily enough, just today our Executive Director attended a meeting of the designated federal officers of all the White House Councils!

Navigating all of the cross-agency
initiatives can get a little confusing.

There's always an incredible amount of overlap in policy since at some level, the challenges and opportunities facing communities, our nation, and the world are interconnected.  In this example, the various White House Councils were all created for specific reasons, but they have some natural overlap. Our Council's efforts on skill development for youth who are neither in school nor in the workforce naturally align with some of the work of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which was created by executive order just one month after the Council for Community Solutions was created.

As I've mentioned before, the Council is currently working on its interim recommendations to the President. Part of this effort has involved outreach to federal agencies whose work is relevant to youth policy and community development. This afternoon, we hosted a conference call with staff from a few cabinet-level agencies to gather their feedback. My main takeaway from the call was that there is a great deal of ongoing interagency collaboration in just these areas where policy areas align. Still, there was some mention -- and detailed description -- of initiatives in which the Corporation for National and Community Service is a key partner. With so many cross-agency efforts, lines are easily blurred and crossed.

Collaboration across institutions is difficult -- and it takes time. As the Council works to create a framework for how communities can collaborate more effectively across sectors, one ongoing challenge is to what degree organizations in collaborative efforts should have an inclusive big tent that encompasses everything and everyone while still having enough specificity to make a tangible impact.  I read a new 99% tip yesterday on "How to Break Through Bureaucracy to Keep Projects Moving" that suggests how innovation can surface regardless of organizational size, process, and procedures. While that is definitely true, I still wonder how to successfully build collaborative systems that avoid the need for a body that coordinates the coordinating bodies.

Public Meeting Success!

Note: This was supposed to be posted yesterday, but for some reason it didn't go through.

Our work this week
required brain food
like donuts and chai.

This afternoon, the Council had a public meeting to review the Council's proposed activities and interim recommendations to the President. The main outcome of the meeting was for the Council to come to consensus on the recommendation options and proposed next steps. This took a lot of behind-the-scenes work, and the public conference call was the culmination of a great deal of work on our end for the past month or so.

The Council consists of twenty-six CEOs and high-profile representatives of youth-serving organizations, foundations, corporations, universities, and more. These are all incredibly brilliant individuals and they bring with them smart staff members as well. Together, we had to work together across a variety of locations across the US and the world over the past few weeks to move from a laundry list of brainstormed ideas to big idea generation to consolidated work streams to a cohesive holistic recommendation. It took many conference calls, strings of emails, and negotiation to find order from apparent chaos and frame a range of ideas into something that really will drive the critical goal of "all citizens, all sectors, working together."

Here's a link to the document I created to share with the public before the conference call. Even with its lack of extreme detail, it demonstrates how much progress the Council has made over the past few weeks. Hopefully it'll give you a taste of what the Council aims to do, pending White House authorization. The public meeting went without a hitch, and a full consensus of the Council approved the direction of our drafted interim recommendations to the President. Twenty-six sets of strong and valid opinions have found one voice in these interim recommendations.

"No matter where you start, you end up talking about everything."

Blurry secret photo taken
of the floor of the
elevator at HHS.
It has the seal! 

Yesterday morning I took a field trip to the Department of Health and Human Services to meet with the Chair of the Interagency Working Group on Youth Programs and some of her associates who are working on the Strategic Plan for Federal Youth Policy. I've probably mentioned FindYouthInfo.gov, but it's a project of the Interagency Working Group that's working to coordinate programs that support youth by serving as a one-stop shop for interactive tools and resources to help youth-serving organizations and community partnerships plan and implement effective programs for youth. The reason I asked to meet with them was for some guidance on a project I'm working on for the Council.

To help communities collaborate more effectively across sectors to reduce their populations of disconnected youth, we wanted to find some communities across the country that might answer a clarion call to collaborate to serve disconnected youth. I first mapped the country to determine where large populations of disconnected youth reside, and then I attempted to gauge which communities have enough existing capacity and resources that could be galvanized into collective impact. I played with a few different criteria and landed on a combination of past or current evidence of effective collaboration, high-impact federal, state and local resources, and strong community leadership. The intersection point of these areas of need and areas of opportunity may be potential opportunity zones for the Council to engage.

When I talked with the staff of the Interagency Working Group, they had some good examples of "best practices" communities like Philadelphia, which has Project U-Turn. They also mentioned their current work on the Strategic Plan for Youth Policy, which further reiterates how silo-ed disconnected efforts alone cannot move the needle. Apparently they hosted public listening sessions for comment on the Strategic Plan and although some sessions for focused on a particular issue like education, health, or housing, inevitably, the session would end up covering everything. Moments like those give me hope that our collective mindset is shifting away from individual programs to collective action.

Vox populi

Tami Taylor, played by Connie Britton

I recently started watching Friday Night Lights, and in an episode in the first season, Tami Taylor the guidance counselor says to one of her students, "It's part of my job to make sure that you don't grow up stupid. It's bad for the world." Indeed.

One way to ensure that young people do not "grow up stupid" is to cultivate healthy informed communities. A couple of weeks ago, the Knight Commission released a policy paper entitled Civic Engagement and Community Information: Five Strategies to Revive Civic Communication.

The first strategy -- Create a Civic Information Corps using the nation's "service" infrastructure to generate knowledge -- is an exemplar of why service should be a core strategy in our quest to address the world's most challenging public problems. The proposed Corps would invite young people to responsibly use digital media to create and publicize local information to connect people within communities.

I remember being skeptical of Patch when I first heard about it when my first Northwestern roommate started working there, primarily because the community-specific news platform seemed to exist only in upper-middle class white suburban neighborhoods like Winnetka and Kenilworth, IL. When Patch fully embraces its civic mission -- taking lessons from the now sadly defunct Residents' Journal, a magazine written for and by public housing tenants in Chicago, as just one example -- local communities of all ranges of connectedness might build the civic infrastructure that is imagined and advocated by the Knight Commission.

Creative voice has been an important part of my journey into public service. Whether singing in a community choir, performing in musicals and plays, listening to oral histories of residents at retirement homes, or writing and orating persuasive speeches through forensics, voice and performance were building blocks for my thinking about the world at large. One of my first career aspirations was to be a journalist because I viewed it as a way to enact change by showcasing the voice of the people.

Sally Prouty reminded us recently of why public service in general and national service in particular is such an important opportunity to do good work for communities while passing along skills, leadership, training, and empowerment opportunities to transitioning people of all ages:

There is no need more deserving of our attention. No greater cause than providing America's youth with life skills, education and good jobs. No greater importance for our nation than to develop our future problem solvers, innovators and leaders.

Aiming High

I've been working in the Executive Branch, so I can use that as the excuse for not haven't written at all here about activity in the other two branches of the federal government. However, a bill recently reintroduced in the Senate is too good to be mention. Sadly, it's very unlikely to become law in the foreseeable future (it has died in committee twice before), so it's a little too good to be true.

The Reengaging Americans in Serious Education by Uniting Programs Act (RAISE UP) is a dropout recovery bill that aims to help communities build cross-sector systems to support the 3-5 million disconnected youth across the nation. The Act would authorize the Secretary of Labor to work with the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services, and Housing and Urban Development as well as the Federal Youth Development Council and the US Attorney General to award competitive grants to entities developing strategies to identify and support disconnected youth, with a particular focus on integration and community involvement.

Leveraging the resources of multiple organizations towards a shared vision has immense opportunity for impact. I'm currently working on a project to determine some of the overlap in federal funding in innovation and collaboration around youth development and school and career readiness. Really exciting programs are funded across a wide spectrum of federal agencies, including ones you might not think of as prioritizing education and youth workforce development. The benefits multiply when combined with local efforts like mayoral efforts through Cities of Service and impact volunteering supported by the Corporation's State Service Commissions. Then, there's the layer of philanthropic funding and non-governmental work from the large enterprises of Living Cities and Ready by 21 to smaller community-based organizations like Chicago's Eden Place Nature Center and Inspiration Cafe.

America's final space-shuttle launch may be this later week, but we definitely haven't finished dreaming of a future beyond the final frontier. Regardless of whether RAISE UP becomes law, cross-sector efforts with the support of the federal government will continue to take shape across the nation. The question is whether our legislators will demonstrate some leadership here instead of leaving much of the heavy lifting to community based organizations and philanthropists.

Happy birthday!

Happy five-year anniversary, Education Sector!

Two summers ago, I was a Policy & Communications Research Assistant at Education Sector, a fantastic forward-thinking education policy think tank situated at the intersection of policy, research, and practice. My thinking about urban education policy developed a lot while working at Education Sector, and I'm grateful to the wonderful mentors I had there who helped me translate my policy research into my senior thesis at Northwestern and helped guide my decisions about what I should do post-college.

Although my recent work has shifted more towards asset-based community development and civic engagement at a larger level within city governance structures, my heart will always be in urban education policy. It was wonderful to reconnect with my former colleagues who are still driving the thought leadership on K-12 education, higher education, and the transition between the two institutions.

Thank you, and happy birthday!

Disconnected communities

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to meet Richard Murphy, the founding direct of the Rheedlen Center for Children and Families (that would go on to become Harlem's Children Zone) and the creator of iMapAmerica. iMapAmerica is an innovative project that channels some of the best aspects of asset-based community development, service-learning, and deliberative democracy. 

First, iMapAmerica uses a curriculum to train teenagers to map their communities to uncover the resources that are available and useful to them. Then, it sends out youth volunteers to map their communities, which leads to information that populates dynamic "ilivehere.info" websites. New Orleans, one of the pilot cities, has a great website.

The way that Murphy talks about his work is that children are only in school for 15% of life; outside of school accounts for 85% of life. That said, we can't expect schools to be the silver bullet. Focusing on community solutions and reconnecting and revitalizing communities is the missing link in school reform but also in community revitalization more generally. 

The New Orleans "I Live Here" website seems incredibly useful for youth
looking for resources, but also for youth-serving organizations to
connect more effectively with one another.

Murphy imagines the next evolution beyond mapping pilot cities as a Mapping America Week every two years where youth across the country would walk their neighborhoods and report back on what resources they have -- and, sometimes more importantly, what resources they lack. This information would help state and local governments as well as youth-serving organizations respond to real demand-driven community needs. 

City-based initiatives like Cities of Service are working to re-engage citizens to volunteer their talents and skills to serve their communities and meaningful and mutually beneficial ways. Paired with a broader launch of iMapAmerica and greater support for connecting across sectors within communities could yield incredible impact.

Civic engagement is taking root in more ways than just volunteerism. Perhaps we won't be bowling alone anymore after all. 

Do we spend too much time re-learning?

I spent most of the day at a conference on the elongation of the transition to adulthood hosted by the American Youth Policy Forum and the Future of Children. AYPF is focused on bridging the gaps among the spheres of research, policy, and practice -- an arena close to my heart given my past work relating to translating theory into practice on the subject of improving teaching quality in Chicago Public Schools through learning from what works in professional development and rethinking how teaching is conceived as a profession.

My boss was slated to speak at one of the panels of the conference from the perspective of federal policymaking and the coordination of federal agencies around policies for at-risk/disconnected/vulnerable youth (there seems to be no asset-based term to describe this population of 4-6 million young people who have been failed by societal institutions to the degree that they are both out of school and out of work -- any ideas?). The inter-agency working group on federal programs for youth connects 12 federal agencies to coordinate policies and build a strategic plan for children's policies -- their website maps resources and strategies in a pretty cool way -- and the White House Council aims to take work like this to the next level in terms of promoting public-private partnership networks and making recommendations on federal policy changes.

Each panel of the conference today had a researcher, a practitioner, and a policymaker, and the interplay among them made for some thought-provoking commentary. Some of my takeaways:

• We don't need to create new institutions. We need to move existing institutions to go out on a limb together to change the opportunity structure for young people since upward mobility and social inclusion are what's at stake.
• The silence was deafening in response to a question on the role of businesses and the private sector, which made me glad to know that one arm of the Council's work will be around building sustainable partnerships among businesses, education and credentialing institutions, and youth-serving organizations within communities. 
• Without a shared set of consistent outcomes and a plan for sustainability, we cannot expect collective impact to take shape. Collective responsibility must yield collective accountability for high impact.
• If the systems that punish have accepted that it takes years to change [e.g.: the length of prison sentences], why have the systems that help remain tied to an instant gratification timeline?
• National service is an incredible opportunity to empower youth from all backgrounds to develop the skills to improve their own lives through education and training, while engaging with and improving institutions and local communities.

Despite all of this wisdom and knowledge-sharing, I sensed a bit of frustration around the idea of praxis. One panelist commented that if we don't change the incentive structures that drive diverse sets of institutions that support youth, we'll just perpetuate the isolated "silo-ed" efforts and still be talking about the same issues of the need for collaboration, shared language, and collective impact decades from now.

The cynical part of me is reminded here of David Tyack and Larry Cuban's Tinkering Toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform, which reminds us that it's incredibly challenging to change institutions like school systems since even after a century of reform cycles, the basic structure of the school system has basically remained the same.

Yes, reform may be cyclical, but I wonder if some time is wasted trying to carve out a niche, trying to be unique, trying to create new organizations and enterprises rather than connecting what already exists. After all, creativity is about connecting things that already exist.

Do we spend a bit too much time relearning and repackaging existing knowledge instead of taking action on the understanding of what works? Obviously, it's not that simple, but it was a wake up call for thinking about where I envision my potential role -- spend a little less time thinking about creating new theories of change, flashy terminology, and new ways to delineate key elements for success and a little more time connecting potential change-makers and leveraging the existing knowledge and resources to take action.

The power of the printed word.

Source: Indexed

I didn't quite believe it when I heard in my Negotiation class in the Spring that the printed word is incredibly powerful, and that for some reason, people often assume legitimacy and finality when agendas are printed, figures are on a printed page, or anything is tabulated -- even though we live in an era where the majority of people have access to a printer.

That theory has been validated in the last few weeks of work. Once ideas take root, they are incredibly tough to destroy. Since the All-Council meeting that took place at the beginning of the month, I've been helping the Council focus on determining the collective next steps that could have the potential to:

1. yield high impact in connecting youth to education and careers 
2. catalyze needle-moving change

We took the initial step of synthesizing ideas for next steps that were brainstormed at the All-Council meeting. This was expected to be a jumping-off point for greater discussion and bolder idea generation. A few weeks later, apart from some wordsmithing and formatting, that laundry list of potential ideas (ranging widely in impact level, feasibility, and uniqueness) has stayed pretty much the same. When an idea is married to a name and appears on a printed list, it somehow psychologically seems to become real -- Pathways for Success, Youth Engagement Program, so on and so forth.

In his State of the Union address at the beginning of this year, President Obama reminded us:

We do big things. 

From the earliest days of our founding, America has been the story of ordinary people who dare to dream. That's how we win the future.

I trust that the members of the Council will look beyond the apparent "legitimacy" of the printed word, and aim instead to do big things.

Weekend adventures

Saturdays since I arrived in DC have been filled with odd combinations of ~12 hours of fun activities. Yesterday was no exception: a networking brunch, a museum, a gay pride amateur dog show, dinner, and a movie.

The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) works with low-income high school students to translate their "street smarts" into "business smarts" and "academic smarts" through experiential coursework, business case competitions, and more. NFTE provides high-impact opportunities to re-engage high school students who are veering onto dropout pathways and make school more relevant and engaging.   Their efforts are really aligned with the work that the Council is aiming to do, and one of my co-workers who serves as a NFTE ambassador invited me to the brunch, where I met a group of cool young DC-based entrepreneurs and heard from Garrett Graff, social media entrepreneur and the youngest editor of the Washingtonian magazine.

After brunch, I visited the National Building Museum (it's going to stop being free in a week, so see it soon if you're on an intern diet!). Visiting museums always makes me nostalgic about my training in American Studies, where one key aspect was always the fusion of culture, history, literature, policy, and every social science -ology with a special focus on the form and the content of objects. The NBM exhibition on Designing Tomorrow included a variety of artifacts from the World's Fairs in the US during the 1930s. World's fairs were all about imagining the future, which, in a way is what we who aspire to shape policy do every day -- hopefully beyond just the rhetoric of win the future.

And now for something completely different -- dogs!

Inevitable observations on gender and leadership

In one of the final sections of my "Strategy, Structure, and Leadership in Public Service Organizations" course with Andy Zelleke last fall, we opened with the following dire facts:

In the United States, women hold 15% of corporate directorships and constitute about 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs. In the public sector, women comprise 17% of the Senate, 17% of the House, 12% of Governor's mansions, and 25% of state legislator seats. Women make up more than two-thirds of the nonprofit labor force, but less than half of senior staff positions.

We read The Double-Bind Dilemma for Women in Leadership: Damned if You Do, Doomed if You Don't, a 2007 report by Catalyst, a research and advocacy organization working to expand opportunities for women in the workplace, and spent the session discussing some of our own personal and professional experiences relevant to women's underrepresentation in leadership positions. Many comments surfaced around women's competitiveness with other women, and it was saddening to hear that women in leadership positions are not always supportive and helpful to other women.

I feel incredibly lucky to have strong women mentors all around me, from the personal mentorship of my older sister who recently became a doctor, my mother, and my grandmother to friends in many different places. When I started this blog, I emailed the link to 25 mentors from my school years and my past internships. Of the 25, twelve are women. I feel incredibly lucky to have such strong mentors of both genders and from diverse backgrounds.

My summer workplace seems to have a larger proportion of women leaders than might be expected in a government agency. I primarily work with two women leaders -- the Executive Director and a Senior Advisor, and so far they have both taken their informal mentorship roles very seriously, which I really appreciate. The Chair of the Council is also a woman, as are our primary White House contacts at the Office of Social Innovation and the Domestic Policy Council. This kind of critical mass is just what we need in government and beyond.

Over the last school year, I participated in From Harvard Square to the Oval Office, a training program for women who might consider careers in politics (or at least in public service!). There, I learned from and with dozens of smart female Harvard graduate students with incredible potential to make our world better. One of them is now working on Off the Sidelines, a new initiative by Senator Gillibrand, one of the few women senators in the US. The site will be a platform for women to lead their communities and shape our country's future. Do check it out, and get involved.

The neighborhood

En la ciudad, un Pueblo. 


Mount Pleasant is a really cute community. In ways that make me nostalgic about Chicago, it's a really defined neighborhood. It has a history as an escape from the city, the part of the neighborhood where I live is in the vicinity of about four large churches (one of which plays organ music on Sundays that we can hear from inside the house!), a handful of a charter schools, and the long strip of shops that make up the commercial part of town. On Saturdays, there's a farmers' market!

I bought some delicious goat cheese and strawberries that will make up my lunch sandwich of next week. The people around were all really friendly. Even the inevitable people ready to accost you with a clipboard were talking about neighborhood concerns -- a petition to start a community wifi network and tips on weatherizing your home.

Welcome to the neighborhood!

Changing the Way We Do Business

Broader partnerships.

Bolder strategies.

Bigger goals.

Better data.

This morning began with a little field trip to the Hill, where I attended a Congressional Briefing on coordinating child and youth policies at the state and federal level. The Forum for Youth Investment -- an "action tank" -- and its Ready by 21 National Partnership hosted the event, which featured a panel of practitioners who have been working for sometimes more than a decade to align policies across agencies that affect children.

Remarkably, 29 states already have at least one coordinating body such as a P-20 Council or a Children's Cabinet (nearly 10% of states have three or more coordinating bodies, which might be a symptom of collaboration fatigue -- one of the panelists even mentioned how you need a coordinating mechanism for the coordinating bodies!).

The four Bs above are the building blocks for coordinating youth policies, according to the Forum. They're remarkably similar to the five steps for achieving large-scale cross-sector "collective impact":

Common Agenda
Shared Measurement System
Mutually Reinforcing Activities
Continuous Communication
Backbone Organization

Developing common language and complementary goals are key policy recommendations for any alignment effort. I wonder, though, whether progress is sometimes impeded by the tension between being unique/indispensable as an organization/entity and aligning efforts under a shared vision. For instance, "no excuses" charter schools have proliferated nationwide, but although they all share the same underlying values, they each find different acronyms and guiding principles to use. Is this because they are all vying for a perceived zero-sum pool of funding and all must therefore be unique?

Getting back to the event, I really buy into the Ready By 21 Theory of Change, which is very much in sync with the "all sectors, working together" model:

"Doing business differently" is one of those often-repeated truisms, and it's been popping up everywhere this week. Just yesterday at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service, Melody Barnes gave the White House Council for Community Solutions a shout-out. About the Council, the Social Innovation Fund, and other domestic policy efforts of the Obama Administration, she said:

"The Administration's emphasis on results has resonated among communities, philanthropies, and corporations across the country, spawning a new focus on innovation, evaluation, and the metrics for success. It's time for government to do business differently... and we are."

Yes. We. Can.

Learning to Learn

How do people learn best?

That's the question that Sam Chaltain, educator and democratic learning community advocate, spoke about at TEDxSinCity last month. In his book about the topic, Faces of Learning: 50 Powerful Stories of Defining Moments in Education, he interviewed ordinary and extraordinary Americans about their moments of learning. The five key conditions of learning, whether inside the classroom or outside of it, are environments that are challenging, engaging, relevant, supportive, and experiential.

How can students be expected to be engaged in school if they are not built to be optimal environments for learning?

This week's New Yorker includes a review of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses and a few other books and articles in that realm of academic disengagement and the question of why we have college. Entitled "Live and Learn," the article considers the numerous theories that aim to explain why we have college -- for meritocracy, for democracy, and/or for credentialing for careers. Louis Menand writes, "The system appears to be drawing in large numbers of people who have no firm career goals but failing to help them acquire focus."

Guiding focus is not about cookie-cutter chutes and ladders, but about building learning environments where students are motivated and engaged. Student engagement is difficult to measure, but even before entering the maelstrom of higher education, it's an area of concern.

Although high school students drop out of school for reasons ranging from needing an income to needing to stay home with a child, 83 percent cite school-related reasons for dropping out such as feeling disengaged from the academic and social aspects of school.

 "Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire," wrote W.B. Yeats. The challenge for educators of toddlers to adults is to nurture environments that embody the five key conditions of learning, so that young adults don't end up academically adrift.  

The Moment We've All Been Waiting For...

In twelve hours, the Council will convene for its all-Council public meeting for the second time in its brief history. Just like in February, the public session will be live streaming on WhiteHouse.gov. The morning will be a few hours of serious discussion on the challenges facing young people aged 16-24 who are neither engaged in school nor in work and what organizations and communities can do to take collective action to support them more effectively.

The past two days of work have been a marathon of managing logistics and getting materials together, mostly the behind-the-scenes work of making sure all the PowerPoint presentations are accurate and all the hard-copy versions all match them and include the necessary extra information. Today even involved that oh-so-typical intern task of grabbing a cab and rushing hot-off-the-printer materials to the Chairwoman of the Council when she needed them ASAP.

I'll have much more to talk about next week when we're all detoxing from the meeting tomorrow and have had time to process all of the 26-person discussion (and when all of the materials are publicly available!). Also, I'll begin crafting my summer-long projects next week, so that'll definitely be exciting.

It's official!

Today was my first day of work for the White House Council for Community Solutions. First days of new jobs and internships are usually consumed by orientation materials, paperwork, and a lot of catching up in terms of getting to know background information and context. Today was a little bit different.

I've never worked in government before -- let alone the federal government! -- so today I received an official badge, property of the U.S. Government. The morning logistics included taking an oath to swear to support and defend the Constitution. The Office fo Personnel Management has a neat historical description of why federal employees take the oath as a sign of "clear, publicly sworn accountability."

The Council is administered under the Corporation for National and Community Service, which is the federal agency that engages Americans in service through AmeriCorps and other programs. The Corporation's broad mission is to improve lives, strengthen communities, and foster civic engagement through service and volunteering across the country, so it makes sense that the Council would be placed under its umbrella. Both entities champion local community efforts, aim to strengthen public-private partnerships, and foster collaboration as much as possible.

Today wasn't just my first day. It was also the first day of Robert Velasco, II, new Acting CEO of the Corporation. He was previously the Chief Operating Officer at the agency, and this afternoon, he addressed what was essentially an optional all-agency gathering. The budget compromise just a few months ago felt fresh in my mind attending the meeting, especially since Learn & Serve America was completely defunded as a part of that negotiation.

The Corporation for National and Community Service may be a small federal agency, but its mission is resounding. Revitalizing communities across America -- from natural disaster-stricken Joplin to manmade disaster-stricken Detroit -- will take all citizens and all sectors working together.

Schools Plus

This great GOOD piece on "The Coming Paradigm Shift in Education Reform" opens with the reality that "the reform conversation usually focuses on school-centered solutions." The article goes on to explore the efforts of the “Futures of School Reform,” a three-year-old collaboration of 20 prominent education experts who have come to the consensus that our nation's schools will never achieve the goal of universal student proficiency until non-school factors are taken into account.

There are so many false dichotomies in education policy debates. The best example was the debate about two manifestoes written during the 2008 presidential campaign: The Broader, Bolder Approach and The Education Equality Project. Both manifestoes targeted the same goal of improving educational outcomes particularly for students from disadvantaged backgrounds, but neither piece cleanly aligned with political parties – a typical occurrence in the educational world. The distinctive difference between the two proposals was on the question of whether schools should take on some of the responsibilities generally left to community organizations and social work agencies such as health care and psychological services.

Although I did not realize it at the time, my own journey to this work began with community solutions. Seven summers ago, I had the opportunity to teach at SuperKids Camp, a literacy and enrichment camp for inner-city third and fourth grade students in the City of Baltimore. SuperKids is run by the Parks & People Foundation, which works with the city and its school system to provide summer learning opportunities to combat summer slide and provide low-income children with enrichment opportunities they may not otherwise experience.

My SuperKids volunteering experience set me on the career trajectory that led me here today -- exploring Chicago's neighborhoods through community service, studying school redesign and urban education policy in the American Studies Program at Northwestern, and beginning to build university-community relationships through asset-based community development at NU's Center for Civic Engagement and HKS' Student Public Service Collaborative.

Effective cross-sector partnerships exist to support youth across the country, and I'm sure I'll learn more about them as the summer progresses, but for now, it's important to remember the reality of where we are right now:

Four million youth in America are disconnected from school and work. The social safety nets supporting these young adults are so often fragmented and tunnel-visioned. Any game-changing efforts in this arena must integrate existing community assets and resources across sectors more effectively to connect young adults to education and career pathways.

We must challenge communities across America to convene and collaborate to reconfigure how organizations function together and challenge all Americans to engage in sustained and meaningful community service to renew our nation's promise and revitalize our nation's civic health.



PS -- One week until my internship begins!

From civic engagement to civic health

I just finished reading Stephen Goldsmith's The Power of Social Innovation: How Civic Entrepreneurs Ignite Community Networks for Good as preparation for my internship (which begins in about ten days!). Goldsmith is a faculty member at the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) who has served as a mayor in Indianapolis and as the chair of the Corporation for National and Community Service (which is the government agency where the White House Council for Community Solutions is situated). Reading the book this week reminded me a lot of my HKS core coursework, especially on public leadership and management.

The Power of Social Innovation presents a series of case studies of civic leaders of all varieties working with communities to advance systemic change that is community-owned and community-led. Igniting creative civic engagement is particularly significant because the focus is not on creating new organizations and initiatives but on thinking beyond individual organizations and instead on interconnected support networks within fertile communities. This logic is reminiscent of fellow HKS professor Ed Glaeser's The Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, ­Greener, Healthier, and Happier, which espouses the following mantra over and over again: invest in people, not places.

Transforming communities' civic health requires an integrated approach with the public, non-profit, and private sectors working together with communities. Reforming education is imperative, and it's no surprise that many of Goldsmith's examples of successful models that work across sectors in interconnected ways have their roots in education -- America's Promise's Grad Nation efforts, YouthBuild, and Neighborhoods@Work.

The mission of HKS is to cultivate civic leaders who will generate ideas to solve the world's most pressing public problems. We -- and many others -- have an obligation to become the public leaders who will work with communities to lead civic realignment efforts that collaborate effectively across sectors towards greater civic health.

The Summer Ahead

The problems facing today's world are too immense to be tackled by solitary thinkers. Only when change agents work together across sectors can we make a significant and long-lasting impact. This summer, I will be working with the White House Council for Community Solutions to do just that.

Established by an executive order by President Obama in December 2010, the Council is a group of high-profile leaders from across different sectors who are charged with the task of moving the needle on catalyzing local cross-sector solutions to connecting young Americans to great educations and a stronger career trajectories.

I am incredibly grateful to the Women and Public Policy Program and the Adrienne Hall Fellowship for supporting my summer internship. The work I'll be doing is the perfect merger of my intersecting interests in urban education policy, civic engagement, and asset-based community development.

I don't leave for D.C. for another two weeks, but I've been so excited that I've been talking to people at the Kennedy School and beyond and reading as much as I can about collective impact, cross-sector community solutions, disconnected youth, and more.

The Council meets as a large group once every quarter (and I'll be fortunate enough to be in D.C. for one of these this summer). Their first gathering was held in February, and you can watch most of the proceedings online. Here's the opening segment from that first session:

Over the next few months, I'll be documenting my internship and reflecting on the work I'm doing. I hope you'll enjoy reading about what I'm doing, and once I gather the links from my fellow WAPPP colleagues, you can read all about their fabulous internships as well.