By Anne B. Stanton & Alison Powell
Adaptation in philanthropy is
easier said than done. It requires
funders to embrace a
new way of thinking and acting.
Philanthropy, moreover, lacks the kind
of market-based feedback system that drives
adaptation in the for-profit world. But the
value of pursuing more adaptive approaches
to philanthropy has become more salient
in recent years. The Linked Learning initiative
in California, we believe, offers useful
insight into how adaptive philanthropy
occurs in practice.
Linked Learning is a core investment of
the James Irvine Foundation. Over the past
decade, the foundation has invested more
than $100 million in this initiative. The journey
began in 2005, when Irvine started looking
for ways to expand opportunities for
young people in California—those from
low-income backgrounds, in particular—as
they make the transition to adulthood. To
further that objective, the foundation fastened
its attention on the Linked Learning
educational approach, which combines rigorous
academic work with career and technical
education. (One of us, Anne Stanton,
has overseen Irvine’s investment in Linked
Learning. The other, Alison Powell, is part
of a team at the Bridgespan Group that has
provided research and consulting support
for the initiative.)
The results are inspiring: Linked Learning
participants graduate from high school
and enroll in college at higher rates, and
they earn more money in the workforce,
than peers who have not benefited from
this model. Linked Learning, moreover,
is changing the California education system:
What started as a pilot program in a
handful of schools has evolved into a broad
effort to tap $500 million in competitive
grants from the state of California. All
along, we aspired to achieve that sort of
impact. But getting to this point required
us to remain flexible and to adapt nimbly
to changing circumstances.
Anchor Elements
Implementing an adaptive strategy requires a
funder to follow certain core principles. The
funder must anchor its work in a compelling
goal that is backed by solid research. In addition,
it must identify the right role to play
in advancing toward that goal.
At Irvine, our support for Linked Learning
began with a research finding: It’s well
known that attainment of a post-secondary
degree is critical to earning a living wage
later in life. This research was the basis for
setting an anchor goal for the foundation’s
youth program: to enable all California
students to earn a post-secondary credential
by the age of 25. Rather than set
forth a firm “theory of change” to accomplish
that goal, the Irvine team invested
in an array of promising approaches. That
experimentation led us to focus on the critical
importance of enabling young people to
be both college-ready and career-ready. (A
decade ago, when we began this journey, few
funders in the education reform community
were talking about college and career in an
integrated way.)
The idea for this anchor goal originated
partly from the experience of Anne
Stanton, who joined Irvine as the new
leader of its youth program in 2003. Anne
had previously run Larkin Street Youth
Services, a nonprofit that focuses on transforming
the lives of homeless young people.
At Larkin Street, she had seen how education
opportunities that are simultaneously
rigorous and connected to career aspirations
could motivate young people. She had
come to believe, therefore, that any effort
to transform outcomes for young people
must incorporate a curriculum that links
getting an education with pursuing a career.
When she arrived at Irvine, Anne understood
that a fundamental
challenge with such an
approach would be to confront
the stigma associated
with traditional vocational
education. To do so, she
and her colleagues would
need to identify and support
programs that successfully
combine college-level
academic preparation with
equally challenging career-themed
education.
For Irvine, the next step
was to establish a suitable
role for the foundation to
play in advancing the new
anchor goal. How could it
support leaders who were
rallying around the idea of
“college and career readiness”? How could it
help to build a strong field of organizations,
all of them dedicated to pursuing this goal
in California? Ultimately, for the majority of
young people in the state to have access to
career-themed, college-level learning, three
elements would need to be in place: credible
evidence that this model could enable any
young person to succeed; support for schools
and districts to transform their educational
systems; and a statewide policy that would
enable low-income young people to benefit
from the model. At Irvine, leaders decided
that the role of the foundation would be to
serve as the “glue” (to use their word) that
holds those elements together.
To determine the initial needs of this
emerging field, Irvine in 2005 funded a
study by MPR Associates (an evaluation
organization that is now a part of RTI
International). MPR advised Irvine to
found a stand-alone organization that
would serve as a “hub for innovative practice,
policy, and research.” In response to
that advice, Irvine made a $6 million grant
to create ConnectEd, an organization that
became the anchor institution around
which the field could rally.
Pivot Points
Since launching the Linked Learning initiative,
Irvine has stayed true to its goal and to
its role. But along the way, the foundation
also made three significant pivots that illustrate
the practice of adaptive philanthropy.
From the school level to the district level |
Irvine’s support for this field started locally,
with a demonstration project that funded
a network of 16 schools, nonprofits, and
occupational programs to deliver rigorous,
career-themed education to a few thousand
students. After the first year of that effort,
Irvine commissioned an independent evaluation
to assess what worked and what did
not. The evaluation found strong results:
Students who received Linked Learning support
were more likely than peers who did not
receive that support to pass the California
High School Exit Exam as sophomores, to
complete the requirements for admission to
a California public university, and to graduate
from high school.
At that point, the foundation could have
simply focused on adding more schools to
the program. But in assessing the first phase
of the initiative, it found that individual
schools had attained success in spite of what
occurred at the district level. There were
no district policies in place that would expand
Linked Learning opportunities to large
numbers of additional students.
So, in partnership with ConnectEd,
Irvine supported an initiative that enlisted
nine school districts (with a collective student
population of 115,000) to adopt the
Linked Learning approach. An evaluation
of this initiative showed that although
performance varied among districts, the
strategy as a whole was achieving positive
results. But in light of Irvine’s long-term
goal for the initiative, delivering good results
at the scale of just nine districts would
not be sufficient.
From implementation to advocacy | In 2008,
Irvine established the Linked Learning
Alliance,
a statewide advocacy coalition that
brings together educators, business leaders,
and community organizations. In doing
so, the foundation aimed to move beyond
merely supporting district-level programs
and to build a shared sense of purpose among
alliance members. Thanks in part to the
coordinated action of those members, the
California legislature in 2011 created the
Linked Learning Pilot, an effort to help 63
school districts (with a total of more than
600,000 students) implement the Linked
Learning approach. Although the measure
included no direct funding for programs, it
counts as the first major statewide success
for that approach.
Toward a regional strategy | To take advantage
of early policy wins, the Linked
Learning field needed to develop structures
that could support accelerated expansion
while ensuring fidelity to its proven model.
At this point, a new challenge came into
view: Linked Learning seeks to promote
both college and career success—yet education
is organized at the district level,
whereas economic structures typically
extend across city and county boundaries.
Leaders at Irvine and its partner organizations,
therefore, concluded that a regional
approach would best reflect how labor
markets and industries interact with the
educational system.
The push for a regional strategy paid off
in July 2013, when the California Legislature
approved the formation of the California
Career Pathways Trust, a competitive fund
that supports regional consortia in their efforts
to develop systems that will prepare
young people for college and career success.
The legislature initially funded the trust at
the level of $250 million but later doubled
that amount.
To take advantage of the newly available
funding, Irvine worked with both new and
existing regional Linked Learning consortia
to help them submit proposals to the
trust. These regional entities bring together
school districts, companies, community organizations,
and postsecondary educational
institutions for the purpose of implementing
a coordinated Linked Learning strategy.
More than 120 consortia applied for the
trust grants, and 40 of them received funding
in May 2014. The trust will announce a
new round of grants early this year.
As we look back at a decade of grantmaking
in the Linked Learning field, we
might be tempted to view it as a logical
progression: First test and refine the core
model in a small group of schools. Then
expand it to the district level. Then garner
statewide support and funding. Then
adopt a regional approach in order to forge
real-world links between the state’s education
system and its economy. But 10 years
ago, we did not lay out such a plan. Had
we done so, it would have been a waste of
time—and it would have been counterproductive.
Instead, Irvine set out to act as
the institutional glue for a diverse set of
partners as they collectively responded to
challenges and took advantage of evolving
opportunities. Looking ahead, the foundation
and its partners will trust the process
of adaptation to guide them.