Cross-Sector Partnerships

Cradle to Career language included in District Race to the Top Draft Regulations

June 8, 2025

Exciting news for the Strive Network! Cradle to Career language has been included in draft regulations for District Race to the Top program. Included in the recently released draft is a competitive preference priority for Cradle-to-Career Results, Resource Alignment and Integrated Services. This is a great moment for the Strive Network, and a testament to the work [...]

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Communications Toolkit for Strive Network Members Unveiled

May 24, 2025

Yesterday, more than 30 Strive Network communities participated in a Network-member webinar focused on the different ways that these Cradle to Career partnerships can best communicate their work to the media and to local community members. After Carly Rospert, Communications & Strategic Assistance Associate for the Strive Network, unveiled the brand new Communications Toolkit, two [...]

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The Beautiful Side of “Enlightened Self-Interest”

March 20, 2026

Working with a few sites recently, I came to realize that “enlightened self-interest” is a beautiful thing. It’s often referred to in the negative because of the perception that people are being selfish if they think about how the partnership work could help an individual partner succeed. But in the end, real and sustainable partnerships do [...]

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Using Metrics of Success to Build a Lasting Civic Infrastructure

January 31, 2026

While traveling to sites all over the country that are working to build the civic infrastructure necessary to addresses communities’ biggest problems and challenges, we hear about the concerns and issues with effectively engaging a broad cross-section of the community. The recent paper, Transactions, Transformations and Translations: Metrics that Matter for Building, Scaling and Funding [...]

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Transforming Charitable Giving into Social Investing

January 6, 2026

Although published over three years ago, the ideas explored in the Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal article “The End of Charity: How to Fix the Nonprofit Sector Through Effective Social Investing” are still very much relevant today. The article delves into what author David E. K. Hunter calls “three impolitic, unpleasant truths” about nonprofits. These truths [...]

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Aligning the Partnership to Regional Goals

December 21, 2025

A challenging aspect of this work is figuring out how a more focused cradle to career partnership fits into a community’s regional or even state-wide context. In many communities, regional, metropolitan and neighborhood level goals and aspirations already exist. How do we align these goals to that of the partnership so we can ensure collaborative [...]

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Connecting the dots

November 1, 2025

Strive Network and the Cincinnati Strive Partnership were highlighted in an Impatient Optimist blog post: “Connecting the Dots: Is Your Community Program Rich, System Poor?” It’s the question we asked ourselves 6 years ago when the Strive Partnership was conceived - and it’s the question we asked at our 2011 Convening in Portland in September. [...]

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Collective Impact

March 8, 2026

The Stanford Social Innovation Review recently published “Collective Impact,” an article about large-scale social change requiring broad cross-sector coordination. Written by John Kania and Mark Kramer, the overarching principle is that the social sector largely works in isolated segments of need – each foundation has its own mission, its own purpose, its own cause. And [...]

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