Communities across the U.S. spend millions of dollars trying to help children succeed. Schools invest in curriculum, nonprofits host after-school programs, businesses fund scholarships, and local governments support early childhood education. These organizations often track their own metrics, report to their own boards, and celebrate wins in siloes—while systemic challenges remain and students can fall through the cracks on the path to economic mobility.
StriveTogether is working to change this silo solution approach. The nation’s largest network of place-based education partnerships has spent nearly two decades demonstrating that outcomes improve when communities align around the same goals and share the same data. It isn’t necessarily about launching new programs, but better coordinating what already exists.
Place-based partnerships connect nonprofits, businesses, schools, philanthropy, and other organizations by bringing together regional leaders to build a stronger future for their community. By taking a cradle-to-career approach, children are set up for economic mobility from the moment they’re born to the time they enter the workforce.
“Economic mobility in the U.S. has been declining since the 1940s,” says Jennifer Blatz, president and CEO of downtown-based StriveTogether. “People don’t realize that many young people are not on a path to economic mobility, which is essential to achieving the American dream.”
According to Opportunity Insights, only half of U.S. children these days grow up to earn more than their parents did. StriveTogether’s goal is to put four million more young people on a path to economic mobility by 2030, and they’re already seeing progress toward this goal in 69 communities across 28 states. A key contributing factor is access to a quality education.
“You really can’t know whether or not a young person is on the path to economic mobility until a person is 30 years old or so,” says Blatz. “But a set of key research and data outcomes shows that if young people are on track and ready to learn when they start kindergarten, if they’re reading at grade level by third grade, if they’re on an advanced math pathway and taking Algebra I by eighth grade, graduating from high school on time, earning a credential, or entering some form of post secondary education, and completing that credential or postsecondary degree, economic mobility will be much easier to attain.”
[Illustration by Stef Hadiwidjaja]
Before the nonprofit organization officially launched as StriveTogether, the work started coming together in 2006. Nancy Zimpher, who had recently become president of the University of Cincinnati, became concerned that 40 percent of children starting at Cincinnati Public Schools weren’t ready for kindergarten and started conversations with other area education leaders, including O’dell Owens, the Hamilton County Coroner who later would become Cincinnati State president. When discussing a college readiness program, he said, “As long as we remain program rich and systems poor, we will not get more kids into college. And what’s more, I’m going to keep seeing dead kids on my table.”
His direct statement resonated with leaders and soon became a foundation for encouraging change. Rather than starting new programs, the approach leveraged existing resources, shared data, and aligned around similar goals. They worked with local partners like Cincinnati Children’s Hospital and GE Aviation to help make data-driven decisions and shape their work to be more human-centered.
The model attracted national attention by 2011, including coverage in Stanford Social Innovation Review. Communities were reaching out, wanting to know how to replicate the Cincinnati partnerships, and so StriveTogether was born as a network to support the movement. Greg Landsman served as executive director of Strive Partnership, the network’s Cincinnati portion, for almost five years before being elected to Cincinnati City Council and the U.S. House of Representatives.
Nearly two decades later, the “program rich, systems poor” foundation remains at the heart of StriveTogether’s work. The organization builds infrastructure to allow communities to plan around programs, organizations, and initiatives they already have, to maintain data, and to collectively work toward putting children on a path to economic mobility. It reorganized as a 501(c)3 nonprofit in 2017 and developed a new strategic plan to focus on systems change and economic mobility. Today, the Cradle to Career Network reaches 13 million children in 28 states, including eight million children of color.
The approach isn’t limited to just the U.S., either, but has been recognized globally. “Earlier this year, I had an opportunity to go over to the UK and see the Cradle to Career Network they had launched based on the work of StriveTogether, and they have place-based Cradle to Career partnerships across the UK,” says Blatz, adding that she and her colleagues were recognized at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting with the global Schwab Foundation Social Innovation Award for Collective Social Innovation. “It’s really exciting that this approach, which has its roots in Cincinnati, has become a global model for boosting economic mobility.”
Despite the additional attention, Blatz has her eyes on 2030. “We’re really focused on our big goal of putting four million more young people on a path to economic mobility by the year 2030,” she says. “That’s going to require us to not only work with these local place-based partnerships but to also build partnership coalitions of to influence state and federal public policy.”
StriveTogether actively works to multiplying impact by creating new community leaders others through formal training offerings. Courses cover topics like leading change, using data, building civic infrastructure, and collaboration. “This work takes a unique set of skills that aren’t necessarily taught,” says Blatz. “None of us got a degree in this type of work, so we’ve launched a training hub with hundreds of courses online along with coaching and virtual support, bringing together different partners from across the country and across the globe.”
Blatz’s goal is to host 75,000 training hours with community partners by 2030, with more than 5,000 hours already completed. Training is available to help with each of the seven cradle-to-career milestones StriveTogether has identified as being key to building economic mobility in adulthood.
Kindergarten readiness: According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, a child’s success in kindergarten was a consistent predictor of high school success, including academic and health outcomes, school connectedness, and graduation rates.
Early grade reading: When students are proficient in reading by the end of third grade, they’re four times more likely to complete high school, according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation.
Middle grade math: A strong foundation in math at the middle school level improves future workforce opportunity.
High school graduation: High school graduation is a major indicator for future earnings. High school graduates on average make at least $10,000 more annually than individuals who don’t complete high school, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. It also predicts health issues, higher mortality, teen childbearing, and tendencies toward crimal behavior.
Postsecondary enrollment: Attending a public four-year institution boosts a student’s household income at age 30 by 20 percent, according to Annenberg Brown University.
Postsecondary graduation: An associate or bachelor’s degree on average earns $442,000 to $1,051,000 more over a 40-year career than a high school graduate, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Employment: The final step and ultimate goal in the cradle-to-career progression.
The proof that StriveTogether’s approach is in the results. Across the network, communities are closing achievement gaps and implementing policies that impact children daily. Two initiative examples show how this coordination translates into measurable impact, starting with math readiness in Texas.
E3 Alliance is a place-based partnership in Austin bringing stakeholder groups together to evaluate data on kindergarten readiness and key literacy milestones, including educators at all levels. They realized that fewer students were enrolling in advanced math, while research showed that taking Algebra by the eighth grade is a key predictor of postsecondary enrollment and subsequent economic mobility. The alliance conducted a comprehensive study in Texas on the issue of math-course taking patterns and found that completing advanced math courses in high school correlated with college enrollment, retention, and degree or credential completion.
Upon further evaluation, disparities emerged among the students enrolling in these advanced math pathways. “Our highest-performing Black and Hispanic students in central Texas were completing Algebra I by eighth grade at significantly lower rates compared to their white and Asian peers,” says Kaci Kai, E3 Alliance’s senior director of communications.
Among the top 20 percent of students in state math assessments, says Kai, 90 percent of White students were completing Algebra I by eighth grade but only 33 percent of Black students and 46 percent of Hispanic students were. All of the higher scorers had demonstrated the same excellent math ability, but their pathways differed based on race.
“I viscerally remember some educators crying in that meeting. ‘What was the cause of these disparities?’ ” wrote Susan Dawson in her book Changing Education Systems, sharing the steering committee’s reaction to the research. What they learned is that, in order to enter an advanced math pathway in middle school, teachers needed to enroll or recommend students. “You either had to be ‘in the know’ or someone ‘in the know’ had to advocate on your behalf,” says Kai. “Our steering committee determined that implicit bias was a root cause of these disparities and crafted recommendations to close the gaps.”
Teachers and community members studied the data with E3 Alliance and came up with a relatively simple policy shift to automatically enroll students in advanced math if they met certain criteria. Students would then have to opt out of taking advanced math. By automatically opting high-performing math students into advanced eighth-grade math courses, they reduced the equity gap between high-performing Black and White students. “Within five years, we closed the equity gap between Black and White students in Central Texas by 91 percent,” says Kai.
E3 Alliance helped introduce a bipartisan bill in the Texas legislature in 2024 that requires school districts to automatically opt the top 40 percent of the highest performing math students into advanced math classes, which means that all high-performing students across the state now have access to advanced math. “Once you work in changing systems that can positively impact tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of students each year for decades to come, it’s hard to do anything smaller,” says Kai.
In a Colorado region where more than 105,000 young people are falling short of the key Cradle to Career milestones, StriveTogether partnered with the Rocky Mountain Partnership to launched an initiative to change student success trajectory by 2030. “That number of young people can feel overwhelming, and in the past many partners struggled to understand how their individual contributions made a meaningful difference,” says Lisandra Gonzales, CEO of Rocky Mountain Partnership Cradle to Career. “When we help partners identify how many young people they will support to reach a milestone, they can immediately see where they fit.”
StriveTogether helps build civic infrastructure that’s needed to work across systems, and their coaching, financial investment, and thought partnership encourages consistency. Gonzales says their support proved essential as local partners came together to set a target. When they analyzed the rate of progress the region was making before the pandemic disrupted outcomes for young people across the country, partnership leaders agreed that the most realistic and meaningful first benchmark would be to return to pre-pandemic trends by 2030. “When we modeled what it would take to get there, that equated to supporting 71,000 additional young people to meet key milestones,” says Gonzales.
Setting the goal is one thing, but reaching it requires a strategic approach. StriveTogether created the “Know Your Number” campaign to transform an overwhelming statistic into clear and tangible commitments, resulting in the goal of putting four million additional young people nationally on a path to economic mobility by 2030. “The Know Your Number campaign is a way to humanize this work and mobilize a community to rally,” says Blatz. “It also really adds accountability for getting those results.”
The Rocky Mountain campaign works by helping each partner organization identify its specific contribution to that region’s goal of 71,000 young people. A workforce organization might commit to helping young people earn industry credentials, while an early childhood program focuses on preparing children for kindergarten. So far, partners across Adams County and the cities of Arvada, Aurora, and Broomfield (all near Denver) have committed to supporting a total of 52,359 more young people by 2030, covering most of the region’s target number. Early data shows that their work is already moving the needle on outcomes.
Gonzales says her team works closely with Target Champions and High Impact Project partners to review data, interpret trends, and walk through continuous improvement cycles to see what’s working, where strategies need to shift, and where additional support is needed. “The campaign moves our focus from credit to contribution,” she says. “For a long time in collective impact work, conversations about who gets credit for progress could get in the way of true collaboration. Know Your Number has helped shift that dynamic, because everyone can now see their clear piece of the puzzle and how it contributes to the shared goal.”
More U.S. Partnerships
StriveTogether’s network partners are using data and collaborating with a variety of stakeholders and organizations across the country to remove barriers and create pathways toward economic mobility. Here are a few more examples of how the work is producing measurable results.
IMPROVED POSTSECONDARY COMPLETION RATES IN SOUTHEASTERN KENTUCKY
The Appalachian Cradle to Career Partnership launched initiatives like dual-credit courses, paid internships, and hands-on STEM learning to help students gain skills and confidence to complete their programs and enter the workforce. Postsecondary completion rates climbed from 6 percent in 2017 to 26 percent in 2023.
INVESTING IN EARLY CHILDHOOD LITERACY IN WISCONSIN
Four Cradle to Career Network members teamed up to push for investments in child care and literacy. In July 2025, Governor Tony Evers signed into law a $330-million budget dedicated to early childhood and literacy, the largest commitment in the state’s history.
CHILDCARE REFORM IN CONNECTICUT
Multiple organizations aligned strategies to advocate for statewide reform. Connecticut legislators passed multiple bills, including a $600-million budget to sustain affordable childcare into the future.
INCREASED ACCESS TO LEARNING AND WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT OPPORTUNITIES IN BALTIMORE
Network member Baltimore’s Promise increased access to learning opportunities. A separate initiative, CareerBound, aligns education and employer needs through apprenticeships and by connecting high school graduates to occupational training programs. The program has served more than 900 youth, increasing annual earnings by an average of $10,000 for graduates. They plan to expand to 8,000 participants by 2030.