Services & Programs

Support to school district leaders to design and manage change under complex and uncertain conditions.

Guided by our resource, Adaptive Strategic Planning for Education Leaders, learn and apply ways to:

• Meaningfully engage community members throughout the strategic planning and implementation process

• Build trust across diverse community perspectives

• Design flexible goals that remain relevant despite changing conditions

• Create implementation structures that allow for continuous learning

• Transform conflict into creative problem-solving opportunities

• Recognize and leverage existing community strengths and resources

• Measure progress using both quantitative and qualitative indicators

• Develop leadership capacity at multiple levels within your system

• Shift from rigid planning cycles to adaptive, responsive frameworks for educational change management

• Balance short-term needs with long-term vision

We facilitate Communities of Practice that center learning and adaptation—not just action—to drive meaningful organizational change.

Too often, change initiatives focus solely on taking action without learning from and adjusting strategies based on impact. While specific goals and outcomes are context-dependent, common aims for our Community of Practice facilitation include:

• Shared capacity building: Developing shared language, understanding, and increased will, skill, and knowledge to identify, disrupt, and address inequities

• Expanding lenses: Increasing members’ capacity to use a racial equity and systems thinking lens to complex organizational leadership and cross-institutional challenges

• Shifting practice: Influencing shifts in members’ respective approaches, intentions, communications, and/or goals related to equity

• Cultivating authentic community: Cultivate relationships, incorporate processes, and utilize frameworks to develop a meaningful, authentic and robust learning community in which a commitment to learning, being and doing are expected; 

• Driving structural changes: Interrupt existing institutional dynamics/approaches through the formation of an intentional, change-centric community of practice. 

Communities of Practice may serve single or cross-sector institutional groups. Typically year-long, they bring together staff from various programs and departments who are embedded within a system or organization and committed to sustained learning and transformation.

In addition to our open-registration offerings, the National Equity Project provides tailored professional development to districts and organizations that serve to:

• Renew your team's commitment to creating meaningful and lasting change

• Equip leaders with innovative skills, concepts and tools

• Catalyze fresh thinking and actionable strategies

Find the full description of customized professional development offerings here.

For leaders charged with leading system-level initiatives or projects.

Leading transformative change requires more than technical expertise—it demands facilitative skills to navigate complexity, build collective ownership, and sustain momentum across diverse actors in a system. Our Facilitative Leadership Development services strengthen leaders’ capacity to guide groups through adaptive challenges.

Through this work, leaders receive targeted support in:

• Meeting design and facilitation: Planning and leading meetings that generate meaningful dialogue, actionable decisions, and shared commitment rather than simply conveying information

• Navigating group dynamics: Reading and responding to interpersonal tensions, power dynamics, resistance, and conflict in ways that build rather than diminish trust and progress

• Team development and capacity building: Cultivating high-functioning teams by clarifying roles, establishing norms, and creating conditions for collaboration and collective problem-solving

• Coaching through complexity: 1:1 and small group coaching to think through challenges, explore approaches, and reflect on leadership moves in real time

• Managing change with intention: Frameworks and practices to sequence change efforts, communicate clearly about difficult topics, and maintain alignment across multiple actors in a system

• Building equitable processes: Integrating equity into how meetings are run, decisions are made, and voices are elevated throughout the change process

This development work is customized to each leader's context and may include a combination of individual coaching, facilitation support during key meetings or convenings, collaborative planning sessions, and reflection opportunities to strengthen facilitative leadership practice over time.

Responding to what your system is working to change or reimagine.

Sustainable, equitable change doesn't come from implementing predetermined solutions—it emerges from understanding the system as it operates, learning alongside those within it, and co-designing approaches. Our System Design/Redesign work supports organizations, institutions, and cross-sector collaboratives that are ready to fundamentally rethink how they operate, serve, and create impact.

This work is adaptive and responsive, meeting partners where they are in their change journey. We develop strategies—not rigid plans—that allow for iteration, learning, and course correction as conditions shift and new insights emerge. Our approach centers:

• Grounding in data and lived experience: Gathering and analyzing qualitative and quantitative data that reveals how the current system functions, who it serves well, who it marginalizes, and where leverage points for change exist

• Learning as design: Treating the design process itself as an opportunity for stakeholders to develop shared understanding, challenge assumptions, and build capacity for systems thinking

• Inclusive stakeholder engagement: Collaborating with a diverse group of interest holders—including those most impacted by inequities—to ensure that multiple perspectives, experiences, and forms of expertise shape the redesign

• Addressing complexity: Developing approaches and solutions that account for the interconnected, dynamic, and often unpredictable nature of complex systems rather than applying linear, one-size-fits-all fixes

• Centering equity: Designing for a more just and inclusive system or collective effort by interrogating power dynamics, resource distribution, decision-making structures, and whose voices and needs have been historically centered or marginalized

• Building adaptive capacity: Creating conditions and structures that enable the system to continue learning, adjusting, and evolving beyond the initial redesign phase

System Design/Redesign initiatives are collaborative, iterative processes that may include stakeholder analysis and engagement, systems mapping, root cause analysis, scenario planning, prototyping new approaches, and establishing feedback loops to monitor impact and inform ongoing adjustments. The timeline and scope are tailored to the scale and complexity of what is being redesigned—whether it's an internal organizational structure, a cross-institutional initiative, or a community-wide collaborative effort.

Support for leaders to engage focal student inquiry groups toward building cultures of belonging in the classroom.

Students are experts in their own experience—yet their insights are too often missing from conversations about teaching, learning, and belonging. When educators systematically gather, analyze, and act on student experience data, they gain crucial understanding of how classroom practices, policies, and environments impact different students and can make informed changes that foster genuine inclusion and belonging.

Our work in Using Student Experience Data supports school and district leaders in establishing focal student inquiry groups: intentional processes for centering student voice, particularly from students who have been historically marginalized or underserved. This approach moves beyond one-time surveys or focus groups to create ongoing structures for listening to, learning from, and acting in partnership with students.

Through this work, leaders receive support in:

• Designing data collection processes: Creating methods and protocols to gather authentic student experience data through interviews, focus groups, surveys, classroom observations, and other approaches that honor students' perspectives and lived realities

• Establishing focal student inquiry groups: Identifying and engaging specific groups of students (e.g., students of color, multilingual learners, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students) whose experiences can illuminate patterns of inequity and inform targeted action

• Facilitating meaningful conversations: Building skills to facilitate student inquiry sessions in ways that are culturally responsive, trauma-informed, and that create psychologically safe spaces for students to share openly

• Making meaning together: Analyzing student experience data collaboratively with educators to surface themes, challenge assumptions, identify disparities in experience, and connect findings to instructional practices and classroom culture

• Translating insight into action: Moving from data to design by developing concrete, responsive strategies to shift classroom practices, pedagogical approaches, and relational dynamics in ways that build cultures of belonging

• Creating feedback loops: Establishing ongoing processes for returning to students, sharing what was heard, communicating changes being made, and continuing the cycle of inquiry and improvement

• Building educator capacity: Supporting teachers and instructional leaders in developing the mindsets, skills, and practices needed to regularly seek out, value, and respond to student experience data as part of continuous improvement

This work recognizes that belonging is not a feeling educators can create for students—it's an outcome of intentional practices, policies, and relationships that affirm students' identities, honor their experiences, and position them as partners in shaping their own learning environments. The process is customized to each context and may involve training and coaching for leaders and teachers, facilitation of inquiry sessions with students, collaborative data analysis, and support in designing and implementing responsive changes.