Graduate School of Education

Founded in the early 1900s and organized as a franchise model of approximately 1,800 local fundraising affiliates, United Way has established itself as a premier nonprofit dedicated to supporting the well-being of its communities. During most of the 20th century, local United Ways deployed a "community chest" model, in which community funds were primarily raised to deliver health and human services via other local nonprofits. However, at the turn of the 21st century, United Way began experiencing multiple threats to its viability, and the organization began pivoting to a "community impact" model—a model which focused beyond alleviating symptoms of social issues and aimed to address their root causes by new means such as policy and advocacy. This capstone describes a strategic project at United Way of Greenville County aimed at kickstarting a cultural change in support of its transformation from a "community chest" model to a fully realized "community impact" model in its efforts to remain relevant, credible, and competitive. The capstone focuses on how I applied a systems lens to help United Way of Greenville County evolve into a learning organization using the Deliberately Developmental Organization framework. This capstone highlights the successes and challenges of demonstrating the competitive imperative for learning, improving psychological safety, spreading innovation, and sustaining momentum for transformational change. I conclude that to continue to make progress and adapt within an ever-changing environment, an organization should generate and maintain a state of disequilibrium or “tilt”, which is achieved by incorporating new information and ideas through listening, feedback, and learning.

Research on language acquisition and the cognitive, emotional, and academic benefits of multilingualism point to clear solutions for improving literacy instruction and closing ongoing opportunity gaps for Multilingual Learners. While the research is not new, it has not widely translated to classroom practice and is often excluded from professional development for reading. As this project shows, the state of Texas is poised to reverse this trend through legislatively-mandated professional development on foundational reading instruction. In my residency with the Texas Education Agency, I implemented cross-functional, agile organizational strategies to increase capacity for prioritizing multilingual content in the development of statewide reading academies. As a result, the Texas Education Agency will provide specialized professional development for Spanish-English bilingual teachers as well as support for teachers of Multilingual Learners in general English and ESL classrooms.
In this capstone, I describe the three phases of the project in addition to an intentional focus on learning and leadership structures that I drew on throughout my residency. Through my analysis, I discuss successes and challenges of employing cross-functional structures in a large organization, and suggest that while cross-functional collaboration served to bridge a capacity gap during the course of the project, future hiring for bilingual expertise at the state level is critical to equitably serving teachers of multilingual students in Texas.