Graduate School of Education

“Change happens when a vast number of people come together and defend a vision of the future they’d like to see.” -Angela Davis, Civil Rights Leader—

The Community Schools strategy is a national reform model with proven results. Yet still, its expansion and sustainability has been hindered for a myriad of reasons, including: lack of awareness, systemic capacity gaps, fragmented implementation, and the lack of supportive legislation and funding. As the United Way of Massachusetts Bay (UWMB), a credible intermediary with a 90-year track record of social impact, joined the movement to expand the Community Schools strategy locally while mobilizing Massachusetts Coalition for Community Schools, the central question was: What role might they play in supporting learning to ground this school improvement reform strategy across the state? . This capstone proposes three strategic dispositions for intermediaries — Align, Activate, Agitate — and explores the catalytic power at the intersection of professional learning and networks to transform local practice while creating systems change. Grounded in research on effective networks, professional development, intermediary organizations, Mark Moore’s strategic triangle, and my experience as a principal and school district administrator, I designed the Aligned Regional Competencies (ARC) of Learning and Leadership for Community Schools Professionals, a conceptual blueprint for building a Professional Learning Network (PLN) infrastructure. Aligning with the three stages of Community Schools development the ARC guided the PLN’s sequence, coherence, and learning design. This capstone examines these efforts, including the launch and learning from a PLN pilot, and concludes with implications for my own leadership, UWMB’s role as an intermediary, and the sector at large.

Keywords: Professional Learning Network, intermediary, Community Schools strategy, liberatory leadership

This capstone examined how narrative power was harnessed and deployed within a national network and broader justice movement to influence systems change aimed at improving outcomes for opportunity youth, defined as young people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are out of school and work. The strategic project was designed and implemented at the Aspen Institute Forum for Community Solutions (AFCS), which is the home of the Opportunity Youth Forum (OYF), a network of 45 place-based urban, rural, and Indigenous community collaboratives working across education, workforce, justice, and social service systems. While the network had achieved measurable progress in reducing youth disconnection, this work began with the notion that power operates through meaning-making and that durable change requires transforming the narratives that shape whose lives, knowledge, and futures are valued.

Guided by this premise—and grounded in Black feminist and womanist thought—the project tested how healing practices, coupled with narrative change strategies, could be operationalized through leadership practice, capacity building, network alignment, and youth leadership. It unfolded in three phases: (1) strengthening embodied leadership and a culture of care, (2) building narrative strategy capacity across the network, and (3) supporting coordinated narrative efforts and youth-led storytelling. Core activities included organizational care processes, narrative strategy trainings, cross-network convenings, and small grants to young adult partners.

The findings indicated that narrative change is not primarily driven by communications efforts but by the interaction of leadership practice, relational trust, distributed capacity, and coordinated action. Leadership practices rooted in care enabled collaboration, investments in narrative fluency strengthened leaders’ ability to challenge dominant frames, and network structures supported the spread and reinforcement of aligned narratives. Consistent with Black feminist theory on epistemic power, youth leadership proved critical in shifting whose knowledge was recognized as credible and authoritative.

This capstone argues that narrative power functions as core infrastructure for systems change. For AFCS and OYF, embedding healing and narrative strategy into leadership development, network learning, and youth governance strengthened long-term impact. For the broader social sector, the findings suggest that durable narrative change requires distributed leadership, coordinated networks, and the centering of those most impacted as authors and authorities of new narratives.

This capstone documents and examines a strategic project undertaken within a statewide private operating foundation to establish a research community of practice (CoP) aimed at building will and capacity among participants to initiate and sustain research-practice partnerships across three regions in Texas. The project was embedded in a $1.6 million, multi-year grant funded by a national foundation to support research on the early implementation of strategic staffing models in Texas school districts. The CoP included three regional foundations and nonprofit organizations based in Texas, and university-based research partners selected and funded by the regional organizations. The project operated within a complex organizational and political context marked by organizational restructuring, leadership transition, evolving grant expectations, and ambiguous authority structures.

The review of knowledge for action is grounded in the literature on systems change and field building, research-practice partnerships, communities of practice, and adaptive leadership. During the eight-month residency period captured in this capstone, the strategic project sought to balance the tension between the concrete and pressing short-term goal of building capacity to conduct rigorous, collaborative research on the strategic staffing project and the long-term aspirational goal of sustaining research-practice partnerships. The leadership moves focused on creating clarity, strengthening trust, and building technical and relational capacity among participants to engage in collaboration that spanned organizational and geographic boundaries.

Evidence from surveys, observations, artifacts, and conversations indicates meaningful progress in the relational dimension of the work, including high levels of psychological safety and trust. At the same time, challenges persisted in the community of practice's structural dimensions, specifically regarding role clarity, data governance, coordination, and decision-making authority. The analysis suggests collaboration across organizations requires more than strong relationships and shared purpose; it also requires clear governance structures and attention to authority, accountability, and coordination. These findings have implications for organizations and funders seeking to support cross-organizational collaboration to improve educational outcomes.

This Capstone explores the persistent challenge of implementing coherent, equitable Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS) in public school districts, focusing on a strategic improvement initiative in Somerville Public Schools (SPS). Despite federal mandates and widespread adoption of MTSS as a best practice, many districts struggle to move beyond symbolic compliance. As the Superintendent Fellow and utilizing a trust-centered change management approach inspired by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss, my project aimed to improve coherence in MTSS by recoupling school-based intervention blocks (X-Block), aligning data meeting protocols, and codifying district-wide expectations in a revised District Curriculum Accommodation Plan.

Through relationship-building, targeted data collection, and compelling communication, the work engaged educators throughout the district, catalyzed early shifts in practice, and laid the groundwork for long-term change. While constraints limited full-scale implementation, the project demonstrates how district leaders can build trust, generate urgency, and activate stakeholders to drive adaptive change while leveraging technical solutions. This work offers practical insights for education leaders seeking to move MTSS from theory to impactful practice.

Large urban school systems have long struggled to translate strategic priorities into coherent, system-wide improvement. While districts often adopt ambitious plans to address persistent opportunity and achievement gaps, these efforts frequently falter due to fragmentation across departments, inconsistent implementation, and limited coordination among adults. This capstone examines how coherence can be intentionally cultivated within a complex public school system and what leadership conditions are required to sustain equity-centered change over time.

Situated within Boston Public Schools, this study focuses on the design and facilitation of cross-functional collaboration to align high-quality programming and school facilities as mutually reinforcing components of a coherent system. Through the leadership of cross-collaboration teams, the project involved developing logic models, identifying shared metrics, and creating a transparent, multi-year implementation roadmap. The work also centered the cultivation of psychological safety, the elevation of student and community voice, and the application of an equity planning framework to guide decision-making.

Drawing on qualitative and quantitative evidence—including participant interviews, artifacts from cross-functional teams, and community engagement data—this study finds that coherence is not primarily a technical achievement, but a relational and structural one. Trust emerged as a critical enabling condition: where trust was present, collaboration accelerated and coordination improved; where it was uneven, progress slowed despite strong technical design. Additionally, the findings highlight that cross-functional collaboration must be deliberately designed with clear roles, authority, and accountability to move beyond episodic coordination toward sustained system alignment.

This capstone contributes to the field by offering a model for operationalizing coherence in large districts through structured cross-functional collaboration, while underscoring the central role of trust as the connective tissue between strategy and implementation. The implications suggest that districts seeking to advance equity must move beyond isolated initiatives and instead invest in the relational and organizational conditions that enable adults to work together effectively on behalf of students.

This capstone examines how a global education consultancy can strengthen its capacity for continuous improvement by building the conditions and routines that convert individual expertise into collective judgment. Conducted during a ten-month residency at One World Network of Schools, the project addresses a persistent challenge: while consultants generate deep insight through partnership work, that learning often remains localized within individuals and projects rather than shaping practice across the organization.

Drawing on research in continuous improvement, adaptive leadership, and professional service firms, the project reframes improvement as a function of how organizations organize for learning, not simply the adoption of technical routines. Guided by Jal Mehta’s Continuous Improvement framework of mindsets, routines, practices, and relational conditions, the work tested a particular theory of action: if these elements are strengthened and embedded within existing ways of working, then reflection can reliably translate into action and individual expertise can become shared, strengthening consultative practice and the development of system leaders. In turn, this work aims to support more coherent systems that improve student outcomes across diverse global contexts.

The project drew on both internal and external evidence to inform its design. Internally, I conducted interviews with all team members and administered an organization-wide diagnostic survey, which revealed strong learning mindsets and relational trust alongside the need to strengthen routines and practices that translate insight into action. Externally, interviews with consultants from leading professional service firms surfaced consistent design patterns for organizing learning in judgment-driven contexts.

In response, I designed and facilitated a process of collective diagnosis and sensemaking that translated evidence into shared priorities and moved the organization from reflection into coordinated action. Building on this work, I aligned the organization around a focused set of continuous improvement priorities and designed pilot routines embedded within existing structures such as huddles, retreats, and project cycles. These included teaming structures for case launch, mid-point reflection, and case wrap-up, adapted from professional service firms to help One World organize learning across engagements. The pilots emphasized practice-based learning, shared reflection, and the codification of consultative moves that could travel across contexts. Early findings suggest that progress was bolstered by the work feeling collectively authored and grounded in real practice, with learning built into existing routines so that reflection consistently translated into action.

This capstone makes three contributions. First, it argues that the education sector must learn more deliberately from adjacent fields, particularly business and management consulting, where organizations have developed strong, time-tested approaches to building, scaling, and sustaining learning. Second, it advances a strategic planning methodology that builds collective design and investment while landing on clear priorities and actionable next steps. Third, it demonstrates how to launch and build continuous improvement within an organization, moving from early awareness and shared understanding to initial routines that generate early wins and begin to embed learning into everyday work.

Amid tremendous political, economic, social, and technological headwinds, system-level leaders in K-12 public education face significant pressure to integrate emerging technologies into existing systems while balancing ethical and responsible use. AI integration alone is insufficient; rather, a digital transformation is required, predicated on AI organizational readiness (i.e., the collective aptitude of the system to effectively integrate intelligent technologies across workstreams). This paper leverages a case study from a large school district in California, through which Digital Promise supported an executive cabinet to develop a district-wide vision for AI literacy. While the project was successful, achieving 100% executive satisfaction and 80% internal staff approval, the implementation process revealed lessons around the importance of system coherence and organizational ambidexterity. Ultimately, this capstone introduces the Digital Leadership Convergence Model, which hypothesizes that adaptive leaders effectively catalyze digital transformation by balancing human-centered change management with the technical aspects of technological integration.

Enrichment programs have been increasingly adopted in K-12 schools nationwide due to their impact on student engagement, academic achievement, and social-emotional development. The School District of Philadelphia (SDP) in partnership with the mayor of Philadelphia sought to mitigate the opportunity gap for Philadelphia’s children by providing Extend Day/Extended Year programming in 20-pilot schools in the district. This high-priority initiative was based on the needs of working parents and expanding access to enrichment programs. The district’s Superintendent, along with the mayoral appointed School Board, leveraged the expertise of members of various SDP departments and created a cross functional team to liaise with the mayor’s education team on this initiative. Extended day/Full Day and Extended Year/Full Year is defined as a comprehensive initiative to offer additional programmatic opportunities for SDP students and their families that include services before and after school, winter break, spring break, and during the summer months. I had the responsibility of supporting the roll out of this initiative and collecting data throughout the process to assess the overall effectiveness of the program. This capstone specifically explores the inaugural Winter Break Camp in SDP. By partnering with new and existing stakeholders, developing a comprehensive directory to aid in internal planning, and communicating pertinent information with families, the goal was that SDP and the City of Philadelphia would host a safe, welcoming, and fun Winter Break Camp for the families in Philadelphia. This capstone explores the collaborative process between the school district and the mayor’s office, while simultaneously exploring my leadership learning throughout the strategic project.

This capstone chronicles my journey toward understanding how mission-driven organizations can balance immediate needs with long-term aspirations—particularly when growth accelerates and complexity rises. I focus on a core question: How can a social venture scale effectively while preserving both financial viability and its social mission? Drawing on nearly two decades of leadership experience in PK-12 public education, I learned firsthand that no universally “perfect” model can be seamlessly replicated across contexts; rather, strong systems demand adaptability, continuous learning, and alignment between resources, processes, and priorities. These realizations, coupled with coursework focused on systems thinking, scaling impact, and organizational design, inspired me to explore how for-profit ventures in the broader education ecosystem could work toward greater internal coherence in service of driving meaningful, equitable change and lasting impact.

My residency at 2Revolutions (2Rev), a social venture focusing on building capacity for and sustainability in support of personalized learning, served as a testing ground for these ideas. Through a combination of interviews, empathy sessions, and strategic planning, I examined the tensions inherent in balancing a social mission with financial sustainability. I led efforts to define and refine organizational coherence by clarifying the mission, vision, and theory of action, aligning internal structures with these foundational elements through honest reflection, collective ownership, and readiness to confront both technical and cultural shifts. The strategies and frameworks that shaped my work—ranging from the PELP Coherence Framework to Mark Moore’s Strategic Triangle—affirm that sustainable growth requires more than technical fixes. In conversation with one another, these and other models illuminated a broader theory of action for scaling impact that went beyond my immediate context. I explore how coherent strategy, mission clarity, and organizational capacity can continually reinforce one another. Organizations must develop robust structures for decision-making, establish clear priorities, and maintain a culture that encourages experimentation and shared responsibility. Ultimately, this work resulted in a codified set of strategic priorities and common language at 2Rev, underscoring the importance of unifying vision and processes before scaling widely. By integrating systems-thinking principles, building trust, and systematically assessing—and reassessing—how core processes support both profitability and mission fidelity, leaders can chart a path toward scalable change that holds true to the ultimate goal: improving educational experiences and outcomes for each learner.

This capstone examines a strategic effort to strengthen school leader collaboration and professional learning in Revere Public Schools (RPS), a diverse urban district committed to advancing equitable outcomes through deeper learning. During my 10-month residency with the RPS superintendent, two pressing needs among principals and assistant principals were identified: more opportunities to collaborate and share practices, and greater support in developing the capacity to lead for deeper learning. While RPS has strong, progressive structures for developing instruction and supporting teacher growth, a need remains to develop supports specific to the demands of the school leader role.

The school leader role has grown increasingly complex in recent decades, with mounting responsibilities, high stress, and increasing rates of turnover (Levin, Leung, Edgerton, and Scott, 2020). Recent literature underscores that peer collaboration and networks of professional learning are effective in supporting school leaders—yet such systems are often underdeveloped and underutilized in many school systems (Grissom, Egalite, and Lindsay, 2021). In response, I designed and implemented a Community of Practice (CoP) for RPS school leaders, focused on leadership for deeper learning. By grounding the effort in research literature on professional learning, social learning theory, and change leadership, the CoP provided a collaborative, job-embedded, and participant-driven model for growth. Through the CoP, participating school leaders formed practice groups, co-designed leadership activities aligned to deeper learning traits, and engaged in cycles of implementation and reflection. This model prioritized agency, collaboration, and alignment to district vision—important attributes of both deeper learning and effective professional development.

This capstone’s resulting implications explore how professional learning models like CoPs can be adapted to meet the distinct needs of the school leader role, and how leadership for deeper learning can be more intentionally developed across the education sector. This work demonstrates the power of embedding adult learning in structures that mirror the pedagogy we expect in classrooms—collaborative, creative, and student (or leader)-centered. It contributes a scalable model for leadership development and offers practical insights for designing professional learning that is participant-centered, aligned with district strategy, and sustains school leader growth.

The City Schools of Decatur (CSD), located six miles northeast of Atlanta, Georgia, is a high-performing school district. At first glance, high student achievement results are evidence of outstanding teaching and learning for all students within the school district. However, when achievement data is disaggregated, a different narrative unfolds.

The achievement data for CSD students who identify as Black is far lower than that of their White counterparts. Some student groups have historically been underserved because educators have not provided them with the tools they need to learn and grow. This has been a matter of fact in CSD for decades. Upon the arrival of a new superintendent in the Spring of 2023, it was time for CSD to find the courage for growth and change.

Research shows that school principals have the wherewithal to facilitate change in favor of improved student outcomes. CSD school leaders have the potential to serve all students with support structures in place. As such, tracking and facilitating support could lead to a new CSD narrative. The district and school leadership could become the mobilizers of educational equity, ensuring all students are served according to their learning needs.

Surfacing the courage to lead in CSD required a three-pronged strategic approach that served as the basis for this capstone project. All three prongs leveraged school principals as the agent of change in schools. The first prong focused on facilitating canvas walkthroughs for principals to receive instructional feedback from district leadership. The second prong involved the creation of a school leader playbook that clarified the expectations and district supports that sought to ignite courage in CSD school leaders–courage so they may be true vanguards of data-driven instruction and educational equity. The third prong leveraged school support visits and the strategy that comes with an instructional cabinet support tracker. When the district leadership acts in the spirit of true collaboration, support to principals is stronger and more effective. The canvas walkthroughs, school leader playbook, and instructional cabinet support tracker led to changes in adult behavior that impacted teaching and learning in the classroom and to positive achievement results.

We face an epidemic of loneliness and a crisis in youth wellness. Reflective of challenges across the education sector, youth in Reading, Massachusetts face unprecedented levels of anxiety and depression, the impact of the Covid pandemic, and disconnection. Schools and communities are a crucial part of the solution. The heart of the strategic project I carried out as a doctoral resident in Reading Public Schools is to mitigate challenges through a multi-faceted focus on connectivity: strengthening connections among young people, with families, staff, and community partners.

This capstone illustrates the power of place-based collaborative action to cultivate school and community connectedness. Through strategic alliances with Reading Public Schools, the Reading Children’s Cabinet, the Reading Office of Equity and Social Justice, and the Reading Coalition for Prevention and Support, I developed and implemented a comprehensive initiative to cultivate connectedness and resilience through four major strategies:

● Elevate youth voice and agency to build a community of belonging through youth listening sessions at Reading Memorial High School to discuss students’ sense of belonging as members of Reading Public Schools and in the greater Reading community. ● Strengthen family and community engagement through a year-long event series with Phyllis Fagell, author of Middle School Superpowers, with concrete strategies and tactics to empower middle school students to thrive. ● Build capacity among staff for healthy, respectful relationships in the workplace – at school and in the broader community. ● Leverage an array of community partners to prioritize and coordinate youth mental health services as a community-wide strategy.

The capstone and strategic project it describes shed light on the powerful potential of public education in cultivating healthy interconnectedness. In a complex and evolving context, the school district serves as a vibrant hub of community engagement, illustrating the unique convening power of schools to build healthy relationships, connections, and find common ground – for young people and their communities to thrive.

Knowledge-intensive intermediary organizations learn rapidly through fast-moving, politically mediated delivery work, yet often experience challenges when attempting to convert that engagement learning into reusable organizational memory. This capstone examines that conversion challenge within the National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE), focusing on how a lean Policy team can sustain high-quality state-facing advisory work while building coherent, governed knowledge assets that travel across projects, staff, and time and ultimately create durable value for the organization. Drawing on organizational knowledge creation, knowledge management strategy, transfer constraints, and organizational learning scholarship, this capstone introduces the Knowledge Conversion in a Managed System (KCIAMS) framework to specify the coupled infrastructure required for reuse at speed. Core elements include a clear codification–personalization posture, conceptual coherence anchors, a governance spine, and repeatable learning routines that surface and select what matters.

Using a practice-grounded strategic project conducted during a ten-month leader-in-residence period, the work analyzes two pilot streams: (1) a working group used to strengthen policy product lines and (2) a live Michigan engagement producing politically sensitive policy topic briefs under tight timelines and mixed staffing. Evidence drawn from interviews, artifact audits, version histories, and reflection from pilot participants indicates that lightweight entry routines like charters and writing kickoffs reduced ambiguity for rotating contributors and shortened early drafting and revision cycles, while explicit naming/versioning conventions and review gates improved traceability and cross-project legibility. At the same time, adoption and durability were uneven under delivery pressure, constrained by tooling and repository limitations, ambiguous stewardship expectations, and the risks associated with documenting sensitive judgment in shared environments.

The capstone concludes with design principles for intermediaries seeking to make engagement learning cumulative: 1) specify a deliberate codification–personalization mix, 2) build low-friction governance and bookend routines into ordinary workflow, and 3) invest leadership attention and enable infrastructure to protect conversion labor as core work.

The American high school system is facing a crisis of disengagement, with students expressing disinterest in an outdated model that prioritizes efficiency over deep learning and personal growth. This capstone examines how learning networks can be a catalyst for large-scale educational transformation, offering a future-oriented approach to high school redesign. Anchored in the research by Tony Bryk, Paul LeMahieu, Etienne Wenger, Marshall Ganz, and Ronald Heifetz, this work explores how networks can accelerate learning among systems, build collective capacity, and inspire scalable change.

As a Strategist for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, I supported the conceptualization and launch of the Future of High School (FHS) Network, a national network of high school systems moving beyond the limitations of the Carnegie Unit to advance a new Education Architecture consisting of a broader set of goals, rigorous and engaging learning experiences, and meaningful and actionable signaling systems. This capstone documents the design and execution of the FHS Network through three phases: entering a liminal state of organizational transition, conceptualizing a network that fosters deep and sustained learning, and launching a network to influence national change. By carefully recruiting and supporting twenty-five innovative school systems, the FHS Network seeks to understand the catalyzing forces needed to root, scale, and sustain a new Education Architecture.

This work argues that designing networks for transformation requires both science and art. While both are grounded in research, the science of network design involves strategic recruitment, structured knowledge-sharing, and goal-setting processes. The art, however, lies in navigating human dynamics, fostering trust, and ensuring the network remains responsive to emerging insights. Through this dual approach, the FHS Network aims to generate knowledge that not only supports its members but also informs the broader field of education.

Ultimately, this capstone contributes to the field of educational leadership by providing insights into how networks can drive large-scale change, sustain momentum, and reimagine high school as a place where all students can thrive. While it offers a roadmap for designing networks of learning, it also serves as a compass for navigating the uncertain yet hopeful terrain of national transformation.

One common challenge that organizations engaged in collective impact (Kania & Kramer, 2011) face is a growing need to reach broader audiences and inspire new leaders to advance this work. This capstone explores strategies to expand student engagement with organizations practicing collective impact, through the lens of The EdRedesign Lab (EdRedesign) at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I leveraged the organization’s senior fellowship program, which supports best-in-class leaders, to introduce students to EdRedesign and the collective impact field.

A pivotal moment came when survey data revealed that this emergent field’s vocabulary may create a barrier to entry for students and other professionals. Findings showed widespread unfamiliarity with key terms such as collective impact, cross-sector work, backbone organization, among others. To address this communication barrier, I launched an informal awareness campaign using storytelling to explain collective impact work, demystifying the vocabulary and increasing accessibility. To generate student engagement, I leveraged my connections at Harvard through my roles as a doctoral student, first-year experience residential proctor, and fellow. These efforts contributed to the creation and launch of a new pilot program, the Cradle-to-Career Summer Fellowship, aimed at providing undergraduate students with summer experiential learning at a collective impact organization. The fellowship may serve as a model for organizations across the country to adopt in their efforts to engage undergraduate students.

I make concrete recommendations to address both technical and adaptive challenges (Heifetz, 1994) that organizations may encounter when implementing similar practices. I also identify implications for my leadership and the sector at large. Through this engagement project, I experienced managing from the middle, aligning my workstyle with the organization’s culture, and deepening my understanding of the collective impact ecosystem. My experience as a resident allowed me to learn from a strategic-minded team, reflect on my leadership style, and practice my immunity-to-change goals (Kegan & Lahey, 2009). On a broader level, this work reinforced the importance of intentionally developing a culture of mentorship to scale leadership and ultimately increase impact.

Public education systems are operating in a period strained by fiscal volatility, enrollment decline, leadership turnover, and expanding expectations for impact. Organizations that support districts and states are simultaneously being asked to pursue broader outcomes — such as economic mobility and whole-child development — while navigating tighter funding environments and increased accountability pressure. These external shifts intensify internal demands for coordination, clarity, and sustained execution. Within this context, TNTP, a national education nonprofit, entered a new strategic phase that expanded its scope while both decreasing internal capacity and not restructuring to meet their bold vision for impacting youth across the country.

The problem of practice addressed in this capstone is not rooted in a lack of strategic clarity, talent, or ambition. Rather, the challenge identified was a structural leadership constraint that centralized decision-making authority, coordination responsibility, and escalation pathways in a small subset of organizational leaders — constraining the organization's capacity to lead at scale. With my residency in the Strategy, Growth, and Finance (SGF) Division, I focused my efforts on how this structural reality created bottlenecks, slowed execution, and limited the organization's ability to distribute leadership in service of its strategic priorities. Addressing this challenge required more than procedural adjustment; it demanded a deliberate reconstruction of the systems, processes, and leadership behaviors that shape how authority is held, how decisions are made, and how leaders show up in relation to one another. In doing so, this work moved from diagnosing structural constraints to actively shifting the organizational culture and mindset that sustained them.

The strategic project focused on strengthening SGF’s internal leadership infrastructure. Instead of launching new initiatives, the project redesigned how work moved across the team by clarifying decision rights, establishing shared routines, and codifying meeting and communication norms. Two goals guided the effort: (1) diagnosing systemic causes of capacity strain and designing targeted structures to enable clearer ownership and coordination without increasing headcount, and (2) piloting distributed leadership routines and gathering formative feedback on early shifts in clarity, ownership, and reliance on executive escalation.

Leadership bottlenecks reflected structural design realities; not a lack of individual skill or will. Where ambiguity around authority and sequencing was reduced, distributed leadership behaviors increased and reliance on senior-level escalation decreased. Where ambiguity persisted, centralization remained the default. For TNTP, the implications include prioritizing decision clarity, routinized coordination, and intentional leadership design as enabling conditions for sustainable execution. For the broader PK–12 sector, the findings underscore that transformational ambition requires aligned internal infrastructure and authorization. Bold strategy alone is insufficient. Sustainable impact depends on organizations intentionally designed to carry leadership, coordination, and learning at scale.

Many school board members receive training on procedures, legal responsibilities, and policy development after taking office. Yet the dimensions of governance that practitioners in this inquiry described as the most demanding—the relational, adaptive, and collective demands of the role—remain far less systematically supported. This capstone examines how post-election governance support can be structured to strengthen the capacities required for leading in complex, high-stakes environments. For the broader field, this inquiry raises two questions: How does the sector define and measure governance effectiveness at the school board level, and what forms of collective governance support can function within the structural constraints of elected service?

During a ten-month residency at Leadership for Educational Equity (LEE), a national, nonpartisan civic leadership development organization, the author led the design of a governance support hub for school board members. The hub is organized around three core components: six governance competencies that name what the role demands beyond procedural training, a 24-question scenario-based self-assessment tool, and five high-stakes governance moments that anticipate the challenges board members predictably face. These components were developed through governance and adult learning scholarship, a two-phase inquiry with practitioners across nine states, and iterative engagement with LEE coaches and staff.

Three factors shaped the project's evolution from a competency framework into a full support hub, each pointing to a deeper reason the governance support gap persists. First, the conditions of the role, including individually structured training, public accountability, and limited opportunities for collective practice, are structurally misaligned with how governance capacity develops. Second, in the accounts gathered here, naming governance challenges with precision appeared to reduce practitioners' isolation and create conditions for engagement. Third, the resources to support board members often already exist but may lack the shared structure needed for board members to reach them.

For LEE, the hub offers a model for self-directed member engagement that complements existing coaching and support structures. This capstone contributes practitioner voices, a design framework, and a set of questions to a growing conversation about how the field invests in school board members once they take their seats and govern on behalf of their communities.

This capstone explores the transformative possibility of healing-centered engagement through a strategic project that aimed to scale Flourish Agenda’s Akili Youth Development Model and advance Emancipatory Inquiry as a healing-centered research practice. Flourish Agenda is a national nonprofit organization dedicated to transforming schools, youth-serving organizations, and communities by fostering well-being for young people of color. Grounded in the principles of Healing-Centered Engagement, Flourish Agenda challenges deficit-based models by centering culture, agency, relationships, meaning, aspirations, joy, and community connection as essential elements of healing.

Rooted in the guiding question, What is required to scale healing?, this project integrates elements of design thinking, healing-centered frameworks, and DJ rhetoric to create conditions for sustainable, healing-centered change. Drawing inspiration from the art of DJing—remixing the art of social change—this capstone presents leadership as an adaptive practice that requires moving between flow and frenzy. Just as a DJ curates soundscapes by sampling, blending, and improvising, this project emphasizes emergent leadership as a creative process of remixing strategies, practices, and approaches to foster healing and transformation.

This strategic project unfolds across two primary outcomes: 1) Developing and scaling an Akili Youth Development Model and 2) Documenting culturally-based healing practices to develop and scale Healing-Centered Research. This capstone explores the challenges of navigating a fast-growing organization, the tension between honoring legacy and innovation, and the complexity of measuring healing outcomes in meaningful ways. Drawing from DJ literacy, this project reframes leadership as a dynamic process of remixing—blending ancestral wisdom, community voice, and institutional knowledge to create transformative change.

Ultimately, this project invites healing-centered leadership as both a personal commitment and a collective practice. By embracing the principles of flow, rhythm, and emergent strategy, this work seeks to inspire educational leaders, youth-serving organizations, and community partners to remix learning environments as ecosystems of healing, joy, and liberation.

School districts across the United States are increasingly adopting Portrait of a Graduate frameworks to articulate the competencies students should develop before graduating. However, many districts struggle to translate these aspirational visions into daily classroom instruction. These frameworks are often paired with instructional approaches, assuming that adoption alone will lead to shifts in classroom practice. This capstone examines how a district can move from defining graduate competencies to intentionally operationalizing them through coherent instructional and systems design.

The strategic project was conducted in the Uniondale Union Free School District, a suburban district on Long Island, New York, serving approximately 6,000 students, 100% of whom are students of color and approximately 60% economically disadvantaged. Although, the district had established a Portrait of a Graduate framework, instructional practices were not yet consistently aligned with those goals. To address this gap, the project, From Portrait to Practice, piloted Project-Based Learning as an instructional approach for cultivating Portrait of a Graduate competencies. A teacher Design Team at Uniondale High School engaged in a collaborative process to redesign curriculum units using a research-based PBL framework, supported by structured professional learning, collaboration, and coaching.

Evidence—including teacher surveys, instructional artifacts, and documentation of design sessions—suggests that the Design Team model increased teacher familiarity with PBL, strengthened confidence, and supported the development of authentic, inquiry-based units aligned to the Portrait of a Graduate, with increased instructional ownership among participants.

Analysis indicates that enabling conditions—particularly protected collaboration time, shared instructional tools, and job-embedded professional learning—were critical to teacher engagement and instructional redesign. However, uneven leadership engagement and limited participation beyond the Design Team constrained broader system traction.

The findings highlight important implications for districts working to translate competencies into classroom practice. District leaders must establish clear instructional models, engage in strategic implementation planning, institutionalize enabling conditions that foster professional learning and collaboration, and ensure leadership alignment to enable implementation at scale. More broadly, competency-based visions must be underpinned by deliberate system design to effectively and equitably transform teaching and learning.

Ultimately, a Portrait of a Graduate becomes meaningful only when it is intentionally designed into the systems, structures, and practices that shape daily classroom experiences.

Higher education in the United States is at a crossroads. College enrollment rates have declined for the past 15 years, and many question whether a four-year degree is worth the time, money, and sacrifice it takes to persist to graduation. Most students cite securing a good job as their primary reason for pursuing higher education, illustrating an evolving education landscape where career conversations and programming must be increasingly prevalent to meet individual student and broader economic needs.

Colorado has a unique education paradox, as it leads the nation in post-secondary education attainment. However, Colorado’s high school graduation and college matriculation rates are below national averages, as a significant portion of its highly educated professional workforce is imported from other states. Post-secondary credentials are required to earn a living wage in Denver, making it crucial to strengthen the state’s education-to-career pipeline to fill available jobs. The context above informed my residency at The Denver Scholarship Foundation (DSF), which was created in 2006 to help make college possible for Denver Public School (DPS) students.

My capstone illustrates my effort to develop a coherent career advising strategy that prepares high school and college students for professional success. By creating psychological safety, focusing on organizational learning, and employing a facilitative leadership approach, I strived to create the conditions for future career advising success at DSF.

During my residency, I analyzed the nonprofit career advising landscape. I also conducted background research on theories and best practices for career advising, including career theory, mentorship and social capital formation, career exposure and experiences for high school students, the role of college internships in helping students avoid underemployment, and career metrics. In addition, I evaluated DSF’s existing career programming and reported on stakeholder insights to inform future program design.

I conclude with recommendations for DSF to clearly define career advising, build staff capacity, create more work-based learning and mentorship opportunities, and implement career metrics. I also share relevant sector-wide implications, such as embracing holistic advising and college student success coaching, strategically collecting and using student career data, facilitating transformational partnerships, and providing affordable pathways through postsecondary education.