I Dream Forward to a day when we have turned this crisis around and every child has the opportunity to reach his or her potential. Across sectors, organizations are collaborating to end the dropout crisis. We are proud to be doing our part to make this dream a reality.

Addressing our nation’s urban education challenge begins with an effective, committed teacher—but in high-poverty schools it often takes so much more. What’s needed is a dramatic increase in the human capital—the extra people power—needed to take effective education reforms and school-based innovations to scale. National service is an ideal resource to meet this need.

City Year corps members, ages 17 – 25, partner with teachers to provide evidence-based academic, attendance and social-emotional supports. After school, they help students with homework and lead enrichment activities that extend the learning day. City Year AmeriCorps members are helping students stay in school and on track—or get back on track—to graduate.

A City Year Rhode Island corps member, Amelia Lavin, told me about David, a sixth grader, who spent every day with his head down on the desk, too frustrated, too far behind to participate in class. “I sat down next to him for the next ten months and talked to the hood until it was finally lifted, and then his head lifted off his desk,” she said. “And then his grades lifted—from a D to an A—and finally his confidence.”

This story and countless others inspire me. I believe passionately in the power of young adults to “give a year and change the world.” If we unleash the idealism of America’s young adults to serve at the scale required, with the training needed, in the nation’s highest-need urban schools, our nation’s young adults will lift the heads, lift the spirits and lift the sights of David and hundreds of thousands of more students who have enormous potential to succeed and help our nation flourish. To get there, it is certain that we must be bold. More importantly, we must be bold together to push our Dream Forward.

If you seek transformational outcomes, in my experience, you need a movement of hearts and souls that will follow. In politics, pursuing the election means “broadening the base.” In brand building, winning follows from getting the “maybes” to purchase. In social change, transformation is gated by our ability not only to change the narrative but also to narrate the change as we go. Investing in this capability—to narrate change—invites the civic square to care about and act for the social change you aim at.

If you are an educational reformer, it goes without saying that you better have developed deep credibility within your realm—real standing with educators, real presence with “educational voters.” But the fact is that “educational voters”—those passionate souls who are as committed to reform as you are—are a very small part of the entire body politic. While everyone kinda cares, only a small dedicated core consistently votes education. Same is true in brand building—a small core of brand lovers is at the heart of every brand. Big brands, and winning politicians, and transformative social justice movements—each of these move out beyond the core and make their message relevant and actionable to a broader audience, the “maybes” who are on the surface less interested, less dedicated. But “yes” and “no” only control brands and elections if we let them—“maybe” is the largest constituent audience by far for every idea and issue in the social sphere. Making “maybes” become yes—this is “broadening the base,” building the brand. And making “maybe” into yes is a skill, a competence, a capability and a commitment that I believe should be a strategic imperative for every change agent.

Change the narrative; make the world better. Narrate the change; invite the world to help.

I Dream Forward to everyone sharing the belief that all children have tremendous potential, and to communities holding children to high expectations. On this day, correlations between poverty and achievement, race and educational attainment, and zip code and earnings won’t exist. Children with linguistic and learning differences will thrive in ways that are not markedly different than other thriving children. All children will access the support they need to graduate high school, earn a college degree, and make meaningful contributions to the world through their work.

Because BELL (Building Educated Leaders for Life) believes this dream is attainable, we call the children we serve scholars, and we teach them that despite being born into poverty, there is no limit on what they can do. We teach them that a success in school can be leveraged for success in life, and we provide enriching learning experiences after school and in the summer months, so that there is no “break” from their pursuits of school excellence, and no “break” in their journey towards life success.

At BELL we reach tens of thousands of students, but I Dream Forward to a day when learning for all children goes beyond a few hours a day between September and June. I Dream Forward to a day when instead, all children, not just those from well-resourced homes, access amazing and varied enrichment experiences all day and all year. When this happens, children will learn, they will love to learn, and they will aspire to great things. I Dream Forward to children reaching their aspirations. I Dream Forward to a day when all children excel.

I knew we needed to think differently.  We needed help to challenge our assumptions.  That help was Community Wealth Partners.

Just three months after I was promoted to CEO and downsized the national office to achieve financial sustainability, I engaged Community Wealth Partners to lead us through a strategic planning process. We selected them because of their strong track record, and because of their genuine investment in our mission.  Community Wealth Partners staff visited our Achievement Centers and went beyond the scope of their contract by attending our scholars’ events.  They struck the perfect balance between business and passion.

A strategic plan steering committee with representatives from our four affiliates and national was established to develop a cohesive new plan, based on feedback from our key stakeholders.    We listened closely as school partners and funders encouraged us to leverage our strong model to propel bigger change.

This collaborative planning process was as important as the end product, and the Community Wealth Partners’ team were expert facilitators of the process.  They enabled staff and board leadership to unite, heal, and craft a bold new vision – together. Our bold goal is “By 2030, all students in Higher Achievement cities will graduate from high school, ready for college.”  We grappled with what keeps us restless and determined our work will not be done until that bold goal is achieved.

To achieve that goal, we will work differently, but without sacrificing our high-intensity, high-impact model.  We will concentrate scale in our four cities in a new “zone” approach, in close partnership with schools and with cash investments required.  This approach will ensure financial sustainability and enable Higher Achievement to reach tipping points of culture within single schools and impact many more students.  By 2015, we will directly serve 70 percent more scholars in our rigorous 650 hours per year model and indirectly impact 7000 students.

Schools are lining up to partner with us.  Funders are excited. In fact, we just received a $500,000 investment from the Wallace Foundation to support this strategy. Without Community Wealth Partners’ expert guidance, this bold new thinking would have been impossible.  Now, we Dream Forward.

I decided to try to apply the Manifesto language to our work at the Colorado Health Foundation.  Here it goes:

Together, we will make Colorado the healthiest state in the nation.

We dream of a place where all kids are healthy and fit, where the healthy choice is the easy choice, where kids eat fruit the same way they automatically put on their seatbelts.

We are not shy about our bold goal; we scream it from the eastern plains, from the mountain tops, and from the mesas on our western edge.

Our eyes and ears are continuously looking for ways to reach families with healthy, affordable food – how about kids taking home from school healthy family dinners prepared by the school lunch staff?

We get impatient because we want everyone to see the urgency and the long-term benefits the way we do (they are so obvious) and yet we live in a short-term culture that does not value investments for the long term.

We get discouraged with the lack of physical education in our schools and the dramatic increase of screen time over play time (recently named “arm chair suicide”).

We sometimes secretly fear that the countervailing forces are stronger than us, that we will not be able to overcome the hurdles of raising healthy kids – time, money, cheap and popular but unhealthy food.

But we don’t give up. We won’t give up. We keep going.

We didn’t set this goal because we thought it was low-hanging fruit; we set it because we believe it is essential to the prosperity of our state.

The dream is worth pursuing because kids are the future.  Healthy kids will do well in school, be great employees, raise healthy kids, and allow our state to spend money on education, transportation, and other critical needs rather than health care for diseases caused by obesity.

And the dream always asks more of us and when it does, we have to elevate ourselves to match the challenge.  We need to redesign our buildings and our communities to make physical activity a part of our everyday life, not a required trip to the gym.

I love being unreasonable if that means disrupting the norm so that a new normal can be created – a normal that makes health a right just like education is a right.

We will make everyone an ally in the fight for healthy kids.  Even soda companies will want to participate by formulating healthy beverages that kids love.

We can’t afford to act any way but boldly and when the world pushes back, man, do we Dream Forward all the more.

Since 2008 that dream has taken on a very tangible, real-world form at Lumina, embodied in what we call “Goal 2025.” Goal 2025 calls for the United States to ensure that at least 60 percent of Americans have a high-quality, college-level credential. It is an audacious goal, one that requires this nation to provide postsecondary education to over 20 million more people than we are currently on track to serve. This brief blog does not allow me to provide all of the reasons this goal is an urgent necessity for our country. Let me just note that by 2018 almost two-thirds of the jobs available will require a postsecondary credential and leave it at that.

We know that a better-educated America will be a country in which health, wealth and quality of life will be more equitably distributed across the population. It will be a country better positioned to be an international partner and more capable of the civil dialogue that characterizes a strong democracy.

At Lumina, all of our work and all of our resources are devoted to this one goal. We know we cannot achieve this goal alone – that our work must be part of a much larger, nationwide effort. So we focus on mobilizing people, cities, states, education systems and others to do their part to increase college attainment.

We are impatient, but we are not discouraged – and we will not give up. We are exploring new avenues and innovations required to reach the goal and are finding new allies every day. We know the challenge is huge, and we know the consequences of failure are dire. More important, we know what success will bring: a more prosperous, more secure and more equitable nation.

To Dream Forward is to imagine a world that looks dramatically different than today and to help others see that this world is possible and worthy of their action. We do this by being bold, by reimagining what is possible, but also by being believable and showing that there is a path forward.

After being diagnosed with thyroid cancer over a decade ago, I had the fortune of serving on the board of ThyCa:Thyroid Cancer Survivors’ Association and helped to dramatically grow their network of support groups. We’ve been bold in our work, but believable in showing people how to make progress. We know that thyroid cancer, which affects about 11 people per 100,000 each year, is one of the fastest growing cancers in the country while other cancers are declining. In fact, the medical community predicts that thyroid cancer diagnoses will set a record high in 2013.  It’s a trend that baffles medical researchers.

Our goal: all thyroid cancer survivors live a high-quality life with a positive prognosis by accessing high-quality medical care, knowledge, and resources. We share this vision. We specifically seek out states with high incidence rates and a lack of resources, mobilize volunteers, establish networks of support and access to the best medical professionals, and map our progress in reaching patients and tracking their outcomes. The organization is achieving a highly networked and resourced world in which many survivors live highly fulfilled and productive lives. The organization has grown tremendously in resources and impact. We still recognize, however, that we live in a world in which people die from thyroid cancer. As we Dream Forward, I’ve begun to ask can we realize a world in which no one dies from thyroid cancer?

What do you Dream Forward to?

We’ve asked leaders from across the sector to share what Dream Forward means to them. We are honored to have Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of Lumina Foundation, as our first guest author. Check back tomorrow to read about his dream.

Read on and get inspired. Share how you Dream Forward in response.

With this shift, we bring a fresh lens to the familiar concept of community wealth. For those who read The Cathedral Within, by our founder Bill Shore, you may recall that Shore talks about community wealth as creating wealth that can be directly used for the benefit of a community, as opposed to creating wealth for an individual shareholder. You may even think of it more narrowly as resources generated to promote social change through non-traditional means such as social enterprises or corporate partnerships.

From the examples Shore shared in his book, it is clear that community wealth is in fact created as people from diverse backgrounds connect, engage and share their strengths to lift up their communities. Only when people do this, is it possible to solve problems at the magnitude they exist and create a world in which all people thrive. And this remains at the heart of what we’re about.

We also know that this is hard work, and at times, it can be discouraging. This is where partnership comes in.

To best support change agents who are tackling our communities’ biggest challenges, we know that a deep, genuine commitment to partnership must remain at the core of how we approach our relationships. For those who have worked with us, you know we are not afraid of rolling up our sleeves and working as an extension of your team to get the job done. We’ve always embraced this spirit of intense partnership, and we find that when we do, together, we act more boldly, and together, we get farther.

To us, working in partnership means:

• We are equally accountable to the goal.
• We create, experiment and discover together.
• We value and respect each other’s perspectives.
• We seek first to understand before being understood.
• We are vulnerable with each other—willing to say what we don’t know and willing to share the messiness while we figure out what we do know.
• We recognize that we are a piece of a much bigger, complicated puzzle.
• We engage in open, honest dialogue about the things that matter most.

To recognize the importance of this collaborative spirit in solving social problems at the magnitude they exist, we are Community Wealth Partners.

Together, we explored the world’s challenges, the world we dream of living in—a world that looks dramatically different than the one we live in today—and the many reasons why it’s so hard to create this. We talked a lot about the barriers to realizing this dream, but the one we spent the most time talking about was fear of failure and the unknown. It’s self-inflicted yet it’s the barrier that we believe is at the core of lack of progress. It’s those who are most courageous and who overcome this fear—from Martin Luther King to Ghandi to Amelia Earhart—who have pushed humankind forward.

Our conclusion: We need to inspire courage, encourage boldness, and squelch the fear that holds us all back—all in an effort to move our dreams forward. The Dream is about the idealism that keeps us going and on the path to solving problems at the magnitude they exist. The Forward is about the actions, the tenacity and the grittiness that will get us there. Dream Forward inspires and reminds us to give ourselves permission to hold onto the dream and act boldly on its behalf.

What do you Dream Forward to? Please share with us. We also invite you to Dream Forward with us by watching our video, subscribing to our blog, or following us on Twitter @WeDreamForward.

And remember, when the world pushes back, Dream Forward.

In our last post, our CEO, Amy Celep shared a lesson we’ve learned from clients leading transformational change efforts across the country: “Everything in [your organization’s] space must reflect the ethos that drives the organization.”

We know that for organizations and groups working to effect sustainable and transformational social change, the cultures of those groups will greatly impact their ability to achieve their goals and realize their visions. In our last post we asked you how you have intentionally built culture. In this post, I’d like to challenge you to think about the ways your leadership team has built culture unintentionally. What daily messages are we sending to our colleagues that directly or indirectly shape the culture of our organization and partnerships?

Everything we do within our organization impacts our culture, whether we’re explicitly praising and discouraging certain behaviors or implicitly leading by example. Below are some of the values many of us in the social sector want to foster within our organizations and questions we can consider to help us do so.

Continuous Learning

Many of us say we want our employees to engage in continuous learning, but are we all making time in employees’ work schedules so they can take advantage of professional development opportunities? At Community Wealth Partners one way we engage in continuous learning is by inviting our team to share highlights from any trainings/events they attend. We regularly pass around emails sharing lessons learned and insightful articles we know others on our team might value.

How about you–In what ways does your organization encourage, support, and reward learning?

Innovation and Creativity

For those of us who value innovation and creativity, do we provide space and time where everyone can contribute and where supposedly “crazy” ideas are encouraged? Some organizations set aside space on a white board or time during a monthly meeting for “crazy” ideas to be considered. And then what do we do when employees express new ideas that we know will not work?

I recently met an executive director of a community development corporation who said many times when his employees come to him with a proposed solution he knows isn’t going to work, he supports their pursuit of their idea anyway. He shared,

“Sometimes the best way to learn is to be the one who comes up with the idea and tries to implement it. When my employees see that it hasn’t worked, they understand more clearly the many factors at play. At the same time, they also feel my support and understand the process of problem solving in a new way. The next time they have an idea, they’re more thoughtful about whether or not it can be implemented and what might result. But, more importantly, they stay engaged in problem solving, knowing that they’ll have leadership’s support.”

In this organization, the leadership team knows they’re not the only ones trying to improve the organization. The burden does not rest solely on their shoulders. They’ve got employees working with them, constantly looking for ways to do something more effectively.

How about you—Does your organization reward behaviors that have been done before or behaviors that shake things up a bit and keep the organization on its toes?

Diversity

Many organizations value the wisdom and insight which can only occur when you compose teams of individuals who don’t all think in the same way. But, what happens after new hires are recruited, while they’re learning their new team’s way of working, the organization’s processes and standards? Are we encouraging diverse opinions even while new employees are striving to learn our organization’s “way”?

At Community Wealth Partners, when our consulting teams meet we know inviting alternative perspectives will make our solutions stronger. At some point during any meeting, someone’s bound to ask, “what’s another way of looking at this that we haven’t considered yet?” “What might we be missing?” or “If we were to play devil’s advocate…”

How about you—In what ways does your organization support and leverage diverse perspectives? When someone comes from another industry, has a cultural or racial background not yet represented at your organization, or when a new employee has work experience with a different population, do you make a point to ask them if there’s another way to understand and approach the problem at hand?

In the end, everything we do shapes our culture, whether we’ve chosen to do so intentionally or just happen to find ourselves doing things in a particular way. We may lead every meeting, or we pass the baton over to staff to teach the group. We may keep our door closed most of the time, or take walks around the office to just check-in informally with our team members. Culture consists of both spoken andunspoken norms, values, and behaviors. I encourage you to take a look at your organization’s behaviors and ask yourself, “What messages might we be sending? And are those the messages that will inspire our team to achieve our organizational goals?”