Leadership Community Application

The Illinois Education and Career Success Network invites your community to seek designation as a Leadership Community.

Leadership Communities designated through this application process are eligible to receive targeted technical assistance, capacity building, and funding to support community-level approaches to advance student success in life after high school through strategies designed to achieve career readiness and college/credential attainment. Support will be coordinated through the Illinois Education and Career Success Network Organizers: Advance Illinois, Education Systems Center at Northern Illinois University (EdSystems), and the Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC).

Communities may apply at any time by submitting their completed application to Director Edith Njuguna.

Background

Today, two-thirds of employers say they need employees with some postsecondary education. However, just over half of Illinois residents have a high-quality college degree or postsecondary credential. Many students feel disconnected from the education system, and communities are seeking new ways to bridge the increasing divide between what students are learning in the classroom and the shifting needs of the employment landscape.

The Illinois Education and Career Success Network’s mission is to support communities to increase meaningful and equitable postsecondary attainment so that Illinoisans realize education, economic, and social success. The network’s organizers came together in 2013 to create a community of practice to help local and regional teams accelerate progress. These teams are using the principles of collective impact to support collaboration between public and private partners to:

Make education more relevant for students by driving a deeper connection between what is taught in the classroom and careers in a changing economy.
Facilitate student progression through key education transition points and into careers through innovative college and career pathway design.
Adopt specific strategies to drive equitable college and career readiness and postsecondary degree and credential attainment.
Collect and use a range of local data for continuous improvement.

How Do Network Organizers Support Participating Communities?

Advance Illinois, EdSystems, and ISAC manage a peer-to-peer learning and action network.

General Supports (Publicly Available)	Targeted Supports for Leadership Communities
Hosting an annual convening to bring together communities, technical experts, and state/national leaders.	Providing technical assistance on key activities communities may implement to increase meaningful and equitable postsecondary attainment and civic engagement.
Promoting the work of the Success Network and documenting and sharing best practices in partnership with internal and external members.	Providing guidance and structure for strategic stakeholder engagement and planning to get community agreement on their goals and key activities to achieve those goals.
Connecting local community efforts to state supports to advance equitable postsecondary attainment.	Serving as a conduit for financial support to communities for strategies to increase meaningful and equitable postsecondary attainment.
	Providing a data dashboard that communities can use to analyze their current outcomes, assess progress, and highlight areas of focus.

Theory of Change: Collective Impact

The Success Network is committed to partnering with communities using the process principles of collective impact:

A shared agenda of mutually reinforcing activities and shared qualitative and quantitative goals.
Data-informed decision-making using shared measurement.
Clear articulation of mutually reinforcing activities.
Continuous communication among all stakeholders that make up the birth-to-career system.
The development of backbone support—an organization that can act as an intermediary for the entire initiative and coordinate participating organizations and agencies.

The Success Network recognizes that developing community-level approaches to college and career readiness and postsecondary degree and credential attainment requires a deep commitment from partners across the spectrum of workforce development, education, human services, community-based organizations, employers, and economic development agencies. Coordination requires investment and a model for sustainability, as well as state-level commitments to providing technical and networking support and helping communities leverage available resources in innovative ways.

Leadership Communities will partner with each other, the network’s organizers, and other partners to support developing cross-sector partnerships, determining and seeking adequate financial resources towards community-identified goals, and documenting change.

Strategies to Drive Postsecondary and Career Readiness and Attainment: State Frameworks

A core function of the Success Network is to leverage state policy on college and career readiness and attainment to support communities’ work to improve college and career readiness outcomes. The network’s organizers do this by elevating effective community practice to inform state policy and then tracking local implementation to ensure that state policy is working to help communities equitably increase postsecondary attainment.

The Postsecondary and Workforce Readiness (PWR) Act includes multiple frameworks for activities from middle school through early college that can be used to align the education and career systems in Illinois. The frameworks include Postsecondary and Career Expectations (PaCE), College and Career Pathway Endorsements, and transitional instruction for high school students. The state also initiated competency-based education pilots. To bring tighter alignment between these frameworks and state education goals, the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) included a College and Career Readiness Indicator (CCRI) in the K-12 accountability system.

Unifying Elements of the Frameworks

ACADEMIC READINESS

Students should complete their high school (secondary) education ready for credit-bearing college coursework (i.e., requiring no English or math remediation in college), and, when possible, earn early college credit.

POSTSECONDARY AND CAREER EXPLORATION AND PREPARATION

Students should have a range of experiences and activities that prepare them for what comes after completing their secondary credential.

Connecting secondary to postsecondary: Students should be able to plan for and connect secondary coursework and experiences to postsecondary and career preparation.
Exposure, exploration, and preparation: Students should have the power to make informed decisions about what comes after high school based on their interests and skills. This includes exposure to career clusters, as well as participating in activities along a continuum of work-based learning that support exploration and preparation.
Financial aid implications: Students should know what their financial aid options are and how to access them, no matter what their postsecondary pathway entails.

The Success Network believes that specific actions require a partnership between K-12 school districts, postsecondary institutions, employers, and community members that can lead to successes described in the frameworks. These can include but are not limited to:

Developing a college and career pathway system connecting secondary and postsecondary partners.
Implementing competency-based education graduation requirements in high school.
Participating in the Illinois GEAR-UP (ILGU) program.
Implementing transitional math and English courses in high school to reduce college remediation rates.
Conducting FAFSA (financial aid application) completion campaigns.
Sharing data with partners across the birth-to-career spectrum.

The activities listed above are not exhaustive. The Success Network encourages interested communities to identify strategies that best target the educational and workforce pipeline challenges they identify through their own data. As such, community-determined activities may include strategies targeting students anywhere along the educational pipeline. However, communities must articulate how these strategies ultimately connect to improved college and career readiness and postsecondary attainment.

Expectations of Leadership Communities

As a Leadership Community designee, communities are expected to thoughtfully engage in the Success Network’s peer-to-peer learning opportunities through:

Participating in the annual convening and meetings where appropriate and feasible.
Sharing best practices, milestones, and outcomes regularly with the network’s organizers and other Leadership Communities.
Regularly seeking support from the network’s organizers to achieve goals.
Using local data for continuous improvement.
Leveraging the support of the Success Network and its organizers to help you achieve your goals.

Application Process

Communities interested in receiving the Success Network’s Leadership Community designation should contact Director Edith Njuguna. To apply, communities must outline a plan of action for working with partners to achieve local education and career outcome goals. The plan serves as the application and must address the following issues:

Define your community’s region (i.e., geographic area the community plan will cover).

Identify (or outline the process to identify) 3-5 ways you will measure success, including a timeline. (The metrics may be selected from the Success Network Dashboard at ILSuccessNetwork.org or other sources. Metrics other communities have chosen include FAFSA completion, high school graduation, postsecondary remediation rates, etc.)

Identify (or outline the process to identify) key activities that will commence implementation during the next 12- to 24-month period for increasing college and career readiness and postsecondary attainment. Please briefly describe these strategies.

Identify (or describe your plan to identify) 3-4 priority workforce development and career areas based on the College and Career Pathway Endorsement’s sector areas: Agriculture, Food, and Natural Resources; Arts & Communication; Finance & Business Services; Health Sciences & Technology; Human and Public Services (including Education); Information Technology; Manufacturing, Engineering, Technology & Trades.

Describe how the activities identified will be intentionally designed to eliminate disparities in educational access and outcomes for students from historically underserved and underrepresented populations.

Describe the strategies you currently use or will use to engage individuals or groups that will be impacted by the decisions or activities of your collaborative, when deciding which efforts to focus on to achieve equitable postsecondary attainment goals.

Identify a partner who will serve as a trusted intermediary organization to build a common agenda, articulate mutually reinforcing activities, measurements, and communications across sectors involving PreK-12 education, postsecondary education, employers, and civic community. Examples of intermediary organizations include community-based organizations, Regional Offices of Education, Education for Employment system offices, chambers of commerce, local Economic Development Councils, and existing collective impact leads.

Formally document your partnership with a Memoranda of Understanding (MOU) on all the above goals and activities involving all the following stakeholders, and attach copies to the plan:
- Employers
- Secondary education partners
- Postsecondary education partners, specifically including the area community college
- Municipal leaders
- Representatives from community-based organizations
- Elementary and/or early childhood education partners (optional but highly encouraged)

Describe your plan to engage additional community partners as the work evolves over time.

Developing Your Plan for Submission

Step 1

Contact Director Edith Njuguna to discuss your interest. The network’s organizers can support communities as needed to develop a plan, including helping to coordinate partners, reviewing data, and identifying goals.

Step 2

Download the Word template or copy/paste the 9 points above into a working document.

Step 3

Connect with regional partners to collaborate on your draft. When finished, submit via email.

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