In the United States, we ask state and local governments to do a great deal with limited resources. Every budget cycle requires trade-offs among competing priorities, often under intense time pressure and political scrutiny. In that environment, public dollars frequently flow toward programs that are familiar, longstanding, or administratively convenient rather than those most likely to produce lasting positive outcomes. The result is missed opportunity, despite the best intentions of public leaders.

This problem is especially frustrating because the evidence base for public policy has grown substantially over the past two decades. In that time, rigorous evaluations have identified interventions that improve outcomes in education, workforce development, and economic mobility. Some have demonstrated success across multiple settings, while others have shown strong promise and a clear theory of change supported by credible research. Policy makers know far more today than they once did about what works.

The challenge is how to use that evidence to drive budgets.

We come to this problem from different vantage points: philanthropy, state government, and the evidence-building field. Over the past two years, we have worked together on an approach designed to help states move proven programs from promising ideas to funded priorities. The State Partnership for Proven Programs model uses an advance philanthropic funding commitment to unlock matched public investment, overcome inertia, and reorient spending toward evidence-based solutions. It’s designed not simply to fund effective programs at scale, but to change how governments approach funding decisions by aligning incentives, authority, and accountability around evidence.

The Problem With Traditional Social Spending

Most public social spending is governed by formulas, legacy programs, and incremental adjustments to prior-year budgets. These structures offer predictability and administrative ease, but they also favor inertia over effectiveness. Once a program is funded, it tends to stay funded, regardless of whether it delivers strong results. New programs, even those supported by solid evidence, must compete for scarce discretionary dollars and often face steep barriers to entry.

Bureaucracy tends to reinforce this dynamic. State agencies are rightly cautious about taking on new initiatives that require complex coordination, changes to procurement, or new implementation capacity. Meanwhile, advocates for existing programs often have established constituencies and relationships that help preserve the status quo.

The costs of this structure are real. Dollars that could be directed toward interventions with a proven track record of success like improving graduation rates, increasing earnings, or reducing youth involvement with the justice system instead remain tied up in programs that may do little to change outcomes. Opportunities to scale effective solutions are lost, not because they lack credible evidence, but because funding systems are not designed to reward proof of impact. This may sound like a wonky budgeting problem, but the consequences are deeply human: fewer students completing college, fewer young people receiving effective support, and fewer families benefiting from programs that could improve their lives.

Investing in Evidence

The central innovation of this model is the use of an advance philanthropic funding commitment to change the calculus of public investment.

Under the model, a philanthropic partner (in this case, Arnold Ventures) commits funding upfront, contingent on the state matching those dollars and directing the combined investment toward a menu of programs supported by rigorous evidence. This advance commitment functions as a catalyst. It reduces fiscal risk for the state, creates a clear incentive to engage with more evidence-based interventions, and opens space for conversations that might otherwise stall.

This approach differs fundamentally from social impact bonds or pay-for-success contracts. Those models ask investors to bear the risk while government waits to see if outcomes materialize. The State Partnership model inverts the logic: Philanthropy commits upfront to reduce government’s perceived risk of investing in programs where the evidence already exists, but where funding systems have failed to follow. The first question is no longer simply “Does this work?” For selected programs, rigorous evaluations have already answered that. The harder question is “How do we get proven programs funded at scale?”

Several elements are essential to making this work. First, public leadership must be fully bought in. Public partners, which can be state agencies, local government, or school districts, retain control over program selection and implementation, ensuring that investments align with local priorities and political realities. Second, the partners must share a commitment to using evidence as a practical guide to decision-making; investments are limited to programs that meet the agreed-upon evidence and implementation criteria. Third, the partnership includes technical support to help policy makers assess research, compare options, and design implementation plans that maintain program fidelity.

At the heart of the model is the program menu, and how it’s built matters as much as what’s on it. The menu is intentionally selective: It prioritizes interventions backed by rigorous impact evidence and the capacity for faithful implementation at scale. The point isn’t to crown a handful of favorite programs. It’s to give public leaders a short list of high-confidence options—best bets—where the expected return on scarce public dollars is meaningfully higher. For instance, many tutoring approaches are marketed to schools, but only a subset with rigorous, high-dosage designs have evidence strong enough to justify public investment at scale. A program’s absence from the menu doesn’t mean it’s ineffective. It may simply mean the evidence is still emerging.

Ensuring equity in this model also means creating paths for newer interventions and leaders to gain investment. To that end, Arnold Ventures offered to fund additional randomized controlled trials alongside investments in proven programs, helping build the evidence base for promising approaches that aren’t yet ready for the menu.

Maryland: The First Partnership in Action

When Governor Wes Moore took office in Maryland, he set a clear standard for his administration: be “data driven and heart led.” From the start, the administration looked for new ways to infuse evidence into government spending. State leaders wanted to expand programs that could improve educational attainment and youth outcomes, with a particular focus on young men, but needed a mechanism to do so within existing budget constraints. The advance funding commitment provided exactly that.

The partnership brought together a $20 million advance commitment from Arnold Ventures and a matching $20 million investment from the state. With support from the Coalition for Evidence-Based Policy, Maryland officials reviewed a menu of programs with strong or highly promising evidence of effectiveness and selected those that best fit the state’s goals and capacity. Local stakeholders played a central role in assessing readiness and implementation considerations. For example, district leaders from Baltimore City and Prince George’s County assessed specific school readiness for program implementation, and county leaders explored options to shift funding to support mentoring of high-risk youth.

The resulting investments included expansion of the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) model at four community colleges, as well as implementation of Saga tutoring and ASSISTments, two programs shown to improve K-12 math achievement, in multiple school districts. In addition, the partnership will soon drive significant funding for Big Brothers Big Sisters community-based mentoring in nine Maryland counties.

These programs were selected not because they were trendy or new, but because they had demonstrated meaningful impact in multiple rigorous evaluations and offered a reasonable expectation of success at scale. The ASAP model increased college graduation rates by 15 percentage points in prior evaluations, and the Big Brothers Big Sisters community-based mentoring program reduced youth violence-related delinquent behavior by 24 percent and recurring substance use by 42 percent. In a field where many interventions produce modest or uncertain results, these programs represented unusually strong bets for public investment.

For Maryland leaders, the partnership created a practical mechanism to turn the Moore administration’s evidence-focused priorities into funded programs. By pairing philanthropic dollars with a state match, the advance commitment gave the state a structured way to identify evidence-backed options, allocate matching funds, and move quickly from policy interest to implementation.

What We’ve Learned—and What We’re Still Figuring Out

What surprised us most was how quickly the advance commitment changed the nature of the conversation. Typically, when a philanthropic partner approaches a state government about evidence-based programs, the response is polite but cautious. In this case, the commitment of real dollars up front, contingent on a state match, opened doors to more concrete conversations with state leaders about evidence, implementation, and trade-offs. Most importantly, in Maryland, it helped drive $40 million toward evidence-based programs in less than two years. That kind of speed is unusual in government.

The model also created room for a different kind of conversation: not only which proven programs to expand, but what it would take to implement them well and learn from the expansion. By elevating the focus on impact in funding decisions, the partnership encouraged state agencies, local providers, and philanthropic partners to discuss readiness, adaptation, measurement, and long-term sustainability from the beginning rather than after dollars had already been committed.

At the same time, important questions remain. The partnership created momentum, but momentum isn’t the same as institutional change. The real test is whether states embed evidence preferences into future budget cycles once the advance commitment expires. Will the community colleges that adopted ASAP sustain those practices if external funding ends? Will the school districts that piloted Saga tutoring have the infrastructure to continue it? We are working closely with state and local partners, including the Maryland State Department of Education, to identify opportunities to sustain program implementation beyond the partnership, but the work is hard. Embedding new norms into agencies and procurement systems is slower, less visible, and harder to sustain across administrations than any single partnership.

Future Directions

The State Partnership for Proven Programs is not a panacea. It is one approach to a persistent problem: how to help governments use limited resources more effectively by aligning spending with evidence of effectiveness. Its core insight is that evidence alone is not enough. It must be paired with incentives, shared commitment, and respect for state decision-making.

For philanthropies, the model suggests a role that goes beyond funding individual programs. By using advance commitments strategically, philanthropy can help governments take informed risks and unlock public investment in solutions that have a strong chance of improving outcomes.

For policy makers and practitioners, the model offers a new way to move evidence from the margins to the center of budget decisions. And for the broader social sector, it underscores the value of collaboration across government, philanthropy, and communities to scale solutions. Maryland is the first state to launch a partnership based on this model, but it is not the last. Similar collaborations have launched in Colorado, Oklahoma, and North Carolina.

Investing in what works starts with working together. When partners align around evidence, share responsibility, and commit resources upfront, public dollars can go further and do more good. The State Partnership for Proven Programs model won’t solve every problem in social spending. But it does offer a practical lesson: Evidence doesn’t move budgets on its own. It needs an on-ramp, one that keeps public leaders in the driver’s seat while changing the incentives around what gets funded. We have more proof than ever of what can change people’s lives. The task now is finding the will—and the partners—to fund it.

Across the United States, a new generation of civic leaders is reimagining how bookstores can serve their communities. In rural Mississippi, a former policy advisor returned home to open Friendly City Books, which now runs an annual book festival drawing thousands of readers. In New Orleans’s long-underserved Seventh Ward, a neighborhood native and former finance executive founded Baldwin & Co., a Black-owned bookstore pairing author events with children’s financial literacy workshops. Along the Rio Grande in Brownsville, Texas, a young engineer built Búho (“owl” in Spanish). Created in the spirit of the Junto, Benjamin Franklin’s club for mutual improvement, Bùho hosts lectures and bilingual family events that help connect people across a border city.

Community-driven bookstores like these nurture readers, foster in-person connection, and offer something increasingly rare: a physical space for gathering across generations, perspectives, and walks of life. But despite their value, most need to compete as for-profit businesses in a market increasingly stacked against them. On the one hand, they face the size and scale of e-commerce giants, which can fulfill books cheaper and faster than any local business. On the other, they must contend with the rising cost of living and retail overhead. Despite a well-documented recovery in the past decade, the overall number of US bookstores has fallen by nearly 60 percent since the early 1990s, while recent American Booksellers Association financial surveys show indie bookstores operating on net margins of around 1 percent. Independent booksellers often accept high risk and financial strain to provide a public good, particularly in the less-affluent markets and rural places that need them most.

Recognizing this dilemma, many European countries—including Germany, France, and Italy—have passed laws that protect indie bookstores from the threat of e-commerce and create incentives for communities to invest in their stores. In Asia, the Chinese government subsidizes bookstores directly, including in rural places, while the Japanese government recently launched a task force to revive its bookstores.

In the United States, arts and culture work has long relied more on philanthropy and civil society than government support. The organizations that support bookstores usually do so within the constraints of the for-profit model. The American Booksellers Association and regional trade associations, for example, provide industry education, advocacy, and networking. Author James Patterson and the Book Industry Charitable Foundation provide direct cash support to bookstore owners and employees, often as one-time grants, including during emergencies like fires and floods. And platforms like Bookshop.org have expanded access to e-commerce and digital sales for independent bookstores. But largely missing is a pathway for bookstores to reimagine their structure in alignment with their public mission.

Emerson Collective is a company that supports literacy, education, economic mobility, and the environment through a blend of investment and philanthropy. During the pandemic, as lockdowns and store closures threatened civic life, it began researching the value independent bookstores bring to their communities, the challenges they face, and ways that philanthropy could help them flourish. As the company surveyed the bookstore landscape, it found promising experimentation already underway. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, Magic City Books had adopted a nonprofit structure pairing retail bookselling with literary programming, including more than 100 annual author events and an adult book fair drawing thousands of local readers. And as SSIR documented in 2016, Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park sought to become a “bookstore of the 21st century” by restructuring as a hybrid entity, retaining its retail operations within a for-profit arm while migrating programs and school partnerships to an affiliated nonprofit. The question for Emerson Collective’s philanthropy team, who led this work, was not how to reproduce any one store’s model, but how to distill what was working so that other bookstore leaders could build on it, especially in smaller markets and rural communities.

Hybrid and Nonprofit Models

In 2022, the philanthropy team began inviting community-driven bookstores to consider moving to a hybrid or nonprofit model with Emerson Collective’s support. In a hybrid model, a bookstore operates alongside a sister nonprofit through a shared services agreement. This approach is often most viable for existing store owners, allowing them to retain their invested capital while offering a straightforward legal pathway relative to full nonprofit conversion. While the business retains retail sales, the nonprofit arm takes over programming and community work. This creates operational efficiency and makes it economically viable to do something most bookstores cannot: provide books to children and families who may not be able to afford them. To maximize the nonprofit arm’s efficiencies and minimize costs, the sister nonprofit may choose to purchase books from the bookstore at market or below-market rates, creating a viable, locally rooted mechanism for expanding book access.

The nonprofit model, by contrast, is often a better fit for new bookstores with an explicitly charitable and community-centered mission. In this structure, bookselling and programming operate within a single entity to advance that mission. While this creates a simpler model, leaders must clearly demonstrate that the organization is organized and operated for a charitable purpose (such as advancing education, supporting literature, or combating community deterioration) to qualify for tax-exempt status.

Today, Emerson Collective supports nearly 50 bookstores nationwide, spanning cultural centers like Detroit and Miami; former industrial hubs like Steubenville, Ohio; and rural places such as Wardensville, West Virginia, and Tahlequah, Oklahoma. These partnerships include three to four years of seed funding and a playbook to educate leaders on the model. The company also brings partners together for an annual convening and supports them in traveling to visit each other’s bookstores, which has created a practice of sharing knowledge and collaboration.

The adoption of these models, alongside fundraising coaching, is reshaping the underlying economics of bookstores in ways that support long-term resilience and sustainability. With Emerson Collective’s initial support, partners are raising funds independently to support their nonprofits or nonprofit arms. Fundraising strategies vary by community. Some leaders cultivate relationships with regional foundations and major donors, while others build support through local businesses, membership programs, events, and grassroots campaigns. In a field where margins are razor-thin, even modest support fills a critical gap. This is especially true for smaller bookstores operating hybrid models. Because the hybrid model does not need to add significant overhead and partners already run robust community and educational programs, this revenue often functions as flexible operating support, covering the cost of ongoing charitable work that would otherwise strain the retail side. Fundraising revenue equal to just 5–7 percent of sales can stabilize a bookstore’s operations, providing breathing room to invest in staff and maintain strong charitable programs, and many in Emerson Collective’s early cohorts have already exceeded this goal.

Three Areas of Social Impact

The social impact of sustainable independent bookstores is most visible across three areas: economic vitality, literacy, and social fabric.

In terms of economic vitality, a recent study by Civic Economics and the American Booksellers Association found that independent bookstores recirculate approximately 29 percent of their revenue locally through wages and purchasing—more than double the rate of chain retailers. They also generate additional economic activity by drawing visitors to commercial districts. Customers who come for books or events often stay to visit nearby shops, restaurants, and cafes, contributing to the broader vitality of Main Streets.

Emerson Collective’s bookstore partners are seeing their impact as economic anchors in real time. For example, Lisa Uhrik at Plenty Bookshop, a fully nonprofit bookstore in Cookeville, Tennessee, collected data from customers and 11 neighboring businesses in the 10 months following Plenty’s launch. She found consistent increases in sales across nearby businesses, with reported gains ranging from the mid-teens to nearly 40 percent, while 92 percent of Plenty’s customers reported visiting another local business during their trip downtown.

Regarding literacy, decades of research show that access to books at home is a strong predictor of academic success, even controlling for income and parental education, with the largest effects among children who start with the fewest books. By design, hybrid and nonprofit bookstores are engines of book ownership—not only for regular customers, but also for families with limited access.

Emerson Collective’s partners donate thousands of age-appropriate books to children in underserved communities while also engaging families in the practice of reading together. In Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood, for example, Whose Books pairs bilingual storytimes with book giveaways. This works to destigmatize reading aloud for caregivers developing English fluency and to embed it as a daily practice in the Spanish-speaking households they serve. Surveys and parent testimonials from the company’s portfolio meanwhile suggest increased enthusiasm for reading and more consistent reading practices within the home.

Finally, bookstores play an important role in building the social fabric of their communities. Emerson Collective’s work draws on Ray Oldenburg’s concept of the “third place” outside of home and work that fosters local connection, as well as research by Raj Chetty showing that upward mobility is strongly associated with “economic connectedness,” or the friendships and social ties that form across socioeconomic lines, especially between low- and high-income children. The company’s hybrid and nonprofit bookstore partners are uniquely positioned to function as the community setting where these cross-class connections can form. By design, they serve both regular customers, who purchase new books and attend events, and families with more limited access, who bookstores often draw in through free programming, school partnerships, and book giveaways.

Act 4 Books, a bookstore founded by a fourth-generation dairy farmer in rural Western New York, first introduced many children and families to the bookstore through partnerships with local Title I schools. Now these families are returning for author events, workshops, game nights, and other community gatherings alongside longtime local readers and residents. Models and programs like these are making the bookstore a common place where new relationships form across walks of life, laying the groundwork for community cohesion and opportunity.

Looking to the future, there is an opportunity to coordinate public and private partners to make reading more visible and vibrant across civic life. Emerson Collective is also expanding support for libraries that are finding new ways to collaborate with bookstores on public programs, literacy efforts, and reading initiatives. Policy makers are starting to engage as well: The recently introduced Open Books, Open Doors Act would support bookstores and other local institutions working to combat book deserts and expand access to books for young readers. With the right investment, the United States can set a new standard for how to build thriving and connected communities around books and reading, with great bookstores at the center.

With AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic expected to generate enormous personal fortunes in the years ahead, speculation is already mounting about how this new class of ultra-wealthy individuals will direct this windfall, and what that might mean for society. It is reasonable to assume that at least a portion of these fortunes will flow into philanthropy, potentially adding hundreds of billions of dollars in new charitable giving over time.

Predictably, much of the public discourse has focused on which problems these new philanthropists should choose to address and the practical questions that follow: What funding strategies will be most effective? What kinds of organizations should be built or scaled? What infrastructure, talent, and organizational forms will be required to translate these resources into meaningful impact?

These are important questions but perhaps not the most important for our time. The more weighty question is what responsibilities accompany extraordinary wealth in a world beset with declining trust in institutions, deep polarization, and widespread feelings of political and economic disenfranchisement.

Many of the recent generations of wealth creators, including Gates, Zuckerberg, and Bloomberg, accumulated their fortunes during a period of extraordinary technological transformation, much like the current one. Their philanthropic endeavors reflected a distinctly technocratic ethos: identify a tractable but underinvested problem, assemble the best experts, fund solutions, measure outcomes, and scale what works. This model has produced extraordinary advances in global health, scientific research, education, and public policy.

Yet it has also revealed the limits of expertise, resources, and good intentions as levers for social change. Some of the most ambitious interventions of the past two decades struggled not because they lacked funding or rigor but because they underestimated the importance of legitimacy, trust, and community ownership. Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million effort to reform public schools in Newark remains a case study in the limits of top-down philanthropy.

The challenge facing this new era of philanthropy is compounded by the fact that the institutions that have traditionally mediated between citizens and power are themselves struggling. Civil society organizations, from nonprofits to universities to the media, are confronting their own crises of legitimacy, representation, and public confidence. Critics from across the political spectrum increasingly view these institutions as unresponsive to the concerns of ordinary citizens, even if they may disagree about the causes. Some see them as captured by economic and political elites, while others see them as beholden to ideological agendas that have displaced their core missions. With moral authority in scarce supply, the ability to navigate competing interests, values, and constituencies will be critical for any individual or organization attempting to address social problems.

Resources, expertise, and ambition will be insufficient on their own to repair the fractures in our social order. The defining challenge for this new generation of billionaire philanthropists is therefore not simply determining what to fund but how to exercise influence in a society where trust is fragile and legitimacy cannot be bought. They will need to envision a broader role for themselves, one that casts them not merely as investors and orchestrators of social outcomes but as stewards of the civic conditions that build trust, participation, and shared purpose.

Ironically, despite Andrew Carnegie’s many flaws as an industrialist, his philanthropy was animated by a belief that wealth carried obligations beyond charitable giving alone. Libraries were not simply a service to be delivered, they were civic organizations designed to expand opportunity, agency, and enable broader participation in public life. Likewise, many of the universities, museums, and public institutions established during that era were conceived as enduring infrastructure for a democratic society. That broader conception of philanthropy, as a form of civic leadership rather than provision of goods and services that markets or government are unable to deliver, feels increasingly relevant today.

For that task, the next generation of philanthropists may need guides. Ironically, some of the most valuable lessons may be found within the very institutions many new philanthropists are inclined to dismiss: professionally managed legacy foundations. While the organizational forms and program strategies of foundations such as Ford, MacArthur, Hewlett, and Packard may appear anachronistic to a generation steeped in entrepreneurial culture, it would be a mistake to overlook the experience these organizations have accumulated operating at the difficult boundary between markets, states, and civil society.

To be clear, legacy foundations are hardly immune from the broader crisis of confidence affecting civil society. They have found themselves criticized from several directions—variously accused of being paternalistic, elitist, unaccountable, or ideologically driven. Yet, they remain among the few civic intermediaries whose work routinely spans sectors and time horizons. Over decades, these foundations have helped seed and sustain entire ecosystems of organizations, research fields, civic institutions, and public-interest infrastructure that continue to shape society today. They have supported efforts to expand civil rights, advanced gender equality, strengthened environmental protections, improved public health, and broadened opportunities for historically marginalized communities. Their record is far from flawless, but it demonstrates a capacity not only for institution-building but for helping to catalyze meaningful social change within complex systems.

Their leaders have spent decades navigating the very hurdles that the next generation of philanthropists is likely to encounter: competing constituencies, conflicting values, and persistent questions of legitimacy and authority in a pluralistic society. Few other institutions have accumulated comparable experience operating amid such persistent contestation.

The intellectual and political translation work that foundation leaders perform every day, between trustees, staff, grantees, policy makers, community leaders, and the broader public, may prove increasingly valuable in the years ahead. They have spent decades confronting the limits of philanthropic power and understand that lasting social change rarely emerges from expertise or resources alone. More often, it depends on coalition-building and public buy-in.

Consider the aforementioned example of Newark Public Schools. What if, instead of arriving with a largely predetermined reform agenda, the effort had begun with a period of community listening? What if a meaningful portion of the funding had been devoted to cultivating local leadership, supporting parent organizing, and creating governance structures through which residents could shape priorities and hold institutions accountable? It is impossible to know if the educational outcomes would have been different, but the intervention might have delivered more lasting civic infrastructure.

Such an approach requires a fundamentally different mindset than one that has typically driven technological innovation. It asks philanthropists to see philanthropy not simply as a mechanism for social problem solving but as a means of broadening the agency of communities and strengthening their capacity to shape their own futures.

In the 1960s, the Ford Foundation funded the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corporation, the first community development corporation in the United States. That initiative helped seed what became the modern community development movement by demonstrating how philanthropy could strengthen neighborhood-based organizations. Over time, the model spread to thousands of communities across the country, contributing to affordable housing development, neighborhood revitalization, and local economic growth while leaving behind a legacy of civic capacity and local leadership that lasted far beyond the original philanthropic investments.

The next generation of philanthropists will undoubtedly fund scientific breakthroughs, accelerate technological innovation, and tackle some of humanity’s most pressing challenges. Yet they will also inherit a society grappling with declining trust, weakened institutions, and deep social divides. Even the most elegant interventions can falter when the institutions leading them lack legitimacy or when the communities they seek to serve feel excluded from the process. Scientific discovery, economic opportunity, public health, educational attainment, and even the most responsible development of artificial intelligence ultimately depend on levels of trust and social cooperation that cannot be taken for granted.

This is not simply a moral argument for civic leadership, but a practical one. The most consequential question facing this new era of philanthropy may not be what problems wealth can solve, but how wealth can be exercised in ways that strengthen the democratic foundations upon which all lasting progress ultimately depends.

For most of the past three decades, we have gotten education wrong for students. I say that as a former teacher, district leader, and voice for education reform. Even as a few data points, like graduation rates, have edged in a positive direction, there is low faith in our public schools and few of us feel that we are doing an excellent job preparing students for the future. I think we can sum up where we went wrong very simply: We put too much faith in adults and the systems they assert will solve our nation’s education challenges and too little faith in students, what they tell us they want, and what they believe will prepare them for the future.

So let me start by sharing a bit about some of the high school-age young people whom I have crossed paths with recently in my work with the Center for Rising Generations at the Aspen Institute.

Lucia is a young woman of Chinese descent who lives in New York in a multi-generational community. She recognized that within her community the older generations needed help with technology—setting up cell phones, fixing minor computer problems—and that young people had a hunger to learn more about their heritage and culture. To help address both problems, Lucia started an organization to bridge the generations and provide opportunities for each to learn from the other.

Taylor is a high school student in rural Maine. Even before the most recent sports betting scandals hit the news, Taylor noticed that his teenage friends were spending a lot of time on gambling websites. Knowing that constant gambling was a poor match for the developing teen brain, Taylor started an organization to help build community amongst young men to help them avoid the dangers of gambling.

Just this year, Detroit high school students at the Henry Ford High School recognized that even as young people are more networked than ever through technology, they feel a significant sense of disconnection. To help address this in their community, they developed Disconnect to Reconnect, a program to help students connect with their peers, in-person, without technology. These high school students have planned in-person convenings for their peers at a local park and an overnight lock-in at their school with games and activities, and they have plans to expand these opportunities to deepen connections.

Here is what is striking about each of these examples: They are student-led, focused on challenges that adults may not have identified, and support solutions that are unique to students’ interests. A deeper dive into each project would also show that they are inter-disciplinary, collaborative, and focused on outcomes. These are excellent examples of what happens when we trust students, and they are not unusual.

In fact, we find that among every group of young people, when you provide them the opportunity to craft a solution to problems, they surprise and amaze us. At the Center for Rising Generations, we have had similar experiences with incarcerated youth, with young people with special needs, with recent immigrants, and with every other demographic group.

Young people have done more than enough to earn our trust. I can’t necessarily say the same for policy makers. I believe the education story of the past 25 years is that we have demonstrated a distinct lack of creativity in trying to improve schools, and that we put faith in economic and management systems that have never produced results for all students.

Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka do an impressive and thoughtful job of reminding us of the history of education in our country. It is enlightening to recall how the purpose of schooling and the approach we take to schools has evolved over time. The idea that kept echoing in my head as I thought about their article is that one big thing had changed significantly, and one big thing had not changed at all.

What Has Changed—and What Has Not

The big thing that has changed is we do not know what to teach our children anymore. During the era of job training and apprenticeships, we knew what to teach our children. During the era of Sputnik, we knew what to teach our children. During the era of education reform, we still believed we knew what fundamental skills were going to be important for young people, and we strove to build structures to ensure they got those skills.

Today only about a quarter of people at a national level have faith in public schools. We can, of course, blame that figure on systematic efforts to undermine confidence in public sector institutions, our country’s inability to articulate a clear role for education during the COVID-19 crisis, or a long history of stagnant outcomes of many of our schools. I think that, as educators, we should also look within for the cause of this dissatisfaction.

I don’t think we know what our schools should teach anymore. And it is hard to inspire confidence in our schools when we are, at best, wishy-washy about what schools should teach. In 1995, Steve Jobs said that everyone should learn to code. That may have been sage advice at the time and in fact may still be an idea with merit given the structured, linear thinking that coding can inspire. In the age of AI, however, it no longer feels like the transformational approach that it was a few decades ago. Today’s policy makers continue to strive to figure out what the thing that everyone should learn is. Maybe we should have dedicated AI time. Maybe we should do more to measure durable (or soft, or relational) skills. Or maybe there is going to be something brand new in a few short years that some of us will think needs to fit into the curriculum. So the big thing that has changed is we no longer have a clear idea of what to teach.

The big thing that hasn’t changed is that we still adhere to a very traditional structure for schools—teachers, classes, tests, schedules, tracks, and a clear delineation between what happens during school, after school, and outside of school.

From the most traditional public schools to most of the most innovative charter and independent schools, what I see when I visit schools is a very traditional approach. Perhaps the most detrimental aspect of this structure is that it places all the decision-making power in the hands of the adults—those same adults who are struggling to figure out what schools should be teaching.

As I talk to policy makers and thought leaders, I mostly find myself in conversations that wouldn’t have been new had they happened 20 years ago. They believe charter schools—few of which deliver truly innovative educational approaches and even fewer of which are held accountable for outcomes—will deliver results. Or they believe that market forces, through vouchers or similar arrangements, will produce the results that were promised to us from failed SES programming and previous voucher experiments. Millions of dollars have gone into reimagining high schools. I do not doubt the good intentions behind those efforts, and I share their frustration that we have not produced sufficient results.

Co-Creating With Young People

One of the young people with whom I work a lot—a young person who grew up in a multi-generational household—frequently reminds me that the very best solutions come when you marry the imagination of young people with the wisdom of those with more experience. It seems to me that the future of schooling is exactly the kind of problem we should solve this way.

Co-creating solutions with young people does not happen by itself. It also is not driven by market forces or measured by traditional accountability metrics. To do this work, we are going to have to be brave and we, the policy makers who have made decisions about education since the days of the one-room schoolhouse, are going to have to share power and decision-making with the students who are closest to the schools.

When I was the Chancellor of DC Public Schools, I began to do a little work in co-creating with our students. The work that we did with our students is some of the work that I am most proud of, and one of the regrets I have about my tenure as district leader was that I didn’t start earlier and do more.

There are innumerable examples of how we engaged young people, from the creation of our student cabinet to the student satisfaction survey that drove many of our decisions, but I want to focus on two specific decisions that I made because students told me it was the right thing to do. First, during the first-ever DCPS student budget hearing, at which I gathered students from every high school to provide input on our district budget, one of the clearest messages I got is that we needed to equalize opportunity for advanced coursework across our high schools. In our many years of budget hearings with adults, we never heard the message that more of our students needed more rigorous courses, but that was what our students told us. So we did it. We vastly expanded AP coursework in our high schools and participation rates as well as passing rates went up.

I also heard from students that they wanted more opportunities to learn outside of school, to see the world, and to experience cultural exchange. So we made that happen too. We created opportunities for middle and high school students to travel to Africa, Asia, Europe, and South America during their spring breaks. We paid for travel, including luggage and passports when students needed help, and we created a rewarding, enriching experience for all of our students.

Now imagine what would happen if we engaged students in a conversation about what their schools should look like, how they should be prepared for the future, and how their time should be structured. I honestly don’t know what they would come up with (though I’ll share some guesses in a minute), but I am confident it would not be vouchers, savings accounts, and school data reports.

There is an added advantage implicit in this approach. We, the policy makers, the ones who bring wisdom to the co-creation table, will also be modeling the value of engaging across lines of difference. Perhaps if we show the value of engaging a wide range of students including high-achievers, neurodivergent students, disengaged young people, and students with a variety of ideological perspectives, we can instill the value of designing with those who don’t agree with us in the young people with whom we work.

The responsibility that we hold is to show that co-creation is an approach that produces results that serve our shared goals better. Consider the things you can do right away. Create a student cabinet or a youth advisory committee and listen to them. Conduct a survey of students and share the results and your reaction publicly. Hire young people and give them significant responsibility (and support!). Bring a young person with you to share your speaking engagements and invite a young person to co-author with you. Hold a youth panel at your event (and prepare the young people to be effective participants). Include a young person on your hiring committee and your board. In short, consider all the various levers of power that you hold and demonstrate how much more effective you can be when you share that power.

More broadly, I believe that as leaders, can we do four things to tap into the imagination of young people and to begin the process of co-creation with students.

1. First and most importantly, we should ask students what they want and trust in their answers. Ask students how they want to spend their school days. Ask students what they think they will need to be prepared for the future. Ask students what part of their day is a good use of time and what parts are not. Ask students when they enjoy learning and when they believe they are growing the most. Of course, not every student idea will be a winner, but then not every adult idea is a winner either—yet we still let adults make decisions.
2. Second, just as important, do not greet every student response with an explanation about why the state mandate, teacher contract, school facility, transportation policy, or schedule makes their idea impossible. If we want to unleash our imaginations, we need to remove the constraints that have kept us teaching the same way for 100 years. Winston Churchill once said, “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.” The same is now true for our education structures—buildings, laws, policies. We first shaped them to support our vision for education and now we are letting the constraints those structures create shape our education.
3. Third, don’t assume that it can’t be done. Why couldn’t every high school student spend much of their junior and senior year engaging in apprenticeships? Why couldn’t we do student exchange programs so young people could experience new cultures? Why couldn’t we set up internships that allow students to study the topics that interest them most at a deep level? Why couldn’t students set up schedules that allow them to pursue their art, music, or sports passion while attending their local high school? Somewhere in the country there are private schools that do all these things and more. Our public schools could do them too.
4. Finally, as we co-create with students my expectation is that we will learn that there are many more partners who want to work with us: colleges and universities, non-profits, private sector employers, community organizations. We will need their trust as well as their support. They all have knowledge and resources that we do not have, and many of them are eager to work with the public schools.

I do not think we know what the purpose of education is going to be in five, 10, or 25 years. We have not shown ourselves to be great predictors of the future nor have we shown ourselves to be excellent policy makers in the present. Efforts to shoehorn political agendas of any stripe and economic models ill-suited to producing results for young people are not promising approaches. I have strong faith that the solution to creating schools that are flexible and responsive enough to react to changing needs is to deepen our trust in our ability to create imaginative solutions with young people. Not only will it be effective, it will also be joyful work.

Every so often, a program in workforce development does more than expand opportunity, creating stability and dignity through economic access in ways that materially change people’s lives: Work becomes predictable rather than intermittent, paychecks arrive consistently, and people can plan around rent, transportation, and care, instead of bracing for the next disruption.

These outcomes change how people experience their own lives. Stability means that energy spent navigating daily disruption is freed for forward-looking decisions; risk recedes enough for people to begin exercising agency. Whether work restores dignity worn down by economic instability or systemic exclusion or creates dignity for the first time, stability marks a shift that is fragile, hard-won, and deeply consequential.

When success is unmistakable, pressure to expand follows quickly. Programs reach this level of impact because of disciplined leadership, and because organizations and partners have aligned support, expectations, and opportunities around the realities of people’s lives. Yet at precisely this moment, the dominant question in funding conversations and boardrooms is rarely how to protect what is working, but how fast the work can grow, how easily it can be replicated, and how many more people it might reach.

These questions are well-intentioned, reflecting a desire to extend benefit and steward resources responsibly. But they also reflect how success is defined and rewarded: Measures of reach and expansion tend to carry more weight than indicators of stability, depth, or continuity. As a result, over time, scale can shift from a strategic option to an implicit expectation, even when leaders closest to the work believe that deepening or stabilizing would better support the people they exist to serve.

Much of the existing conversation about scale focuses on readiness, replication models, and execution discipline. Less examined is the way expansion has become the default expectation and how that expectation can shape leadership judgment. The risk is not simply that fewer people are reached in the short term. It is that pressure to grow too quickly compromises the very outcomes and relationships that made the work effective in the first place.

The Hidden Cost of Scaling Under Pressure

These decisions are difficult. Leaders are responsible not only for programs, but for teams working alongside people navigating real lives and real constraints. And expansion is not a technical exercise, but raises equally difficult questions about staffing, systems, partnerships, local conditions, and whether what worked in one place can genuinely hold elsewhere. The risks vary by programmatic model: some interventions can standardize delivery more easily, while others depend on trust development, local labor-market conditions, and critical partnerships that are shaped by place and relationships.

Sometimes, however, leaders hesitate to voice these concerns openly. Naming limits or uncertainty can be misread as a lack of ambition or a threat to continued funding, especially for programs whose revenue depends on the capacity and priorities of partner organizations and systems. In practice, judgment calls are made under pressure rather than through honest dialogue. Over time, when growth outpaces investment in people, systems, and partnerships, organizations begin to stretch faster than they can support. This strain is often amplified by geography, as private capital, philanthropic support, and employer networks are unevenly distributed across regions. When these constraints remain unspoken, work that once operated with care and coherence can begin to fray.

In these moments, burnout often reflects a misalignment between expectations and capacity, particularly when success is defined primarily through expansion rather than through alignment between ambition and what the work can responsibly hold.

Why Scale Becomes a Proxy for Legitimacy

This dynamic is not accidental, and it is not unique to any one organization. Under conditions of uncertainty, scale has often become a proxy for legitimacy. Growth signals seriousness. Replication reassures stakeholders that success can travel. Reach offers something measurable and defensible when outcomes are complex and human lives are involved.

In business, this logic often makes sense. Scale is how value proves itself over time. But social impact work can and should operate under a different logic. It centers people whose lives have been shaped by uneven access to opportunity, long-term underinvestment, and labor markets that reward credentials and networks they were never positioned to acquire. These conditions play out differently across regions, shaped in part by uneven access to philanthropic and corporate capital. As a result, what works in particular contexts rarely transfers without careful adaptation to people and place. Trust and proximity are not easily replicated, and growth tests whether that fit can be preserved.

Organizational research helps explain why these pressures are so persistent. In uncertain environments, institutions gravitate toward models that are easily recognized and validated by funders and boards, a pattern often referred to as institutional isomorphism. The result is that scale becomes less a reflection of what the work requires and more a response to what the system knows how to reward.

Behavioral economics reinforces the same tendency. Leaders are often more focused on avoiding visible failure than on pursuing uncertain gains. In these environments, growth is easier to justify than restraint, even when slowing down to strengthen teams, systems, or partnerships would better serve the people at the center of the work. Scale begins to fail when it shifts from a considered strategy to an unexamined requirement.

Reframing Scale as a Leadership Decision: Expand, Deepen, or Sustain?

Scale has come to be too narrowly defined. If impact matters because lives matter, our frameworks must recognize significance beyond speed and volume. This is not an argument against scale; it is an argument for discernment.

In practice, leadership decisions about scale tend to fall into three paths: expand, deepen, or sustain.

Expansion is appropriate when the goal is to reach more people, and the conditions are genuinely in place. Growth works when funding, staffing, systems, partnerships, and leadership capacity expand together. When these elements are misaligned, expansion can look impressive while quietly weakening delivery and trust.

Deepening is necessary when outcomes depend on proximity, consistency, and sustained engagement. Some interventions create value not by serving more people, but by working more effectively with those already engaged. For talent populations farthest from opportunity, depth is often what makes progress possible.

Sustaining becomes the priority when continuity itself is the outcome, and the cost of disruption is high. Some organizations exist to prevent harm rather than produce visible gains. Their success is often quiet because the worst outcomes never occur. In a period when public investment is uneven and often declining, sustaining this kind of continuity also becomes a long-term revenue challenge, not just an operational one. In these cases, leadership means protecting focus, stabilizing teams, and resisting pressure to grow simply to signal momentum.

These paths make clear that scale is not a single move in one direction. It is a decision about how impact grows. Expanding increases reach. Deepening increases what the work can reliably deliver. Sustaining protects continuity where interruption would carry real cost. Organizations may be scaling even when they are not serving more people on paper, through investments in staff capability, systems, and long-term sustainability.

The mistake is not choosing depth or continuity. It is treating reach as the only form of scale that counts, regardless of what the work actually requires.

When leaders distinguish between these paths, the conversation changes: not whether to grow, but what kind of growth the work actually requires. Decisions become grounded in readiness, risk, and responsibility to the people served and to the teams whose judgment and care make the work possible.

Honoring Who the Work Is For

I am writing this informed by experience leading within local and national nonprofit organizations, including periods of rapid growth and recalibration, and now working alongside them as a funder, with visibility into the different ways organizations navigate scale. Across those roles, I have seen organizations serve their communities well while lacking the space to speak honestly about what the work truly requires.

At the heart of decisions about scale is a simple question: who is this work for? Not every organization is meant to be everywhere. Some are built to serve a specific community, in a specific place, at a specific moment.

Their strength comes not from reach alone, but from clarity about responsibility, accountability, and where each is held. Choosing to serve one community deeply and consistently is not a failure of ambition. It is an act of discipline.

Ultimately, leadership should not be measured by how far something can go. It is measured by whom it is meant to serve, and whether those entrusted with decisions are willing to honor that responsibility over time, carefully, consistently, and with respect for the people and places that give the work its meaning.

What ultimately matters is not how widely the work travels, but whether its impact and integrity can hold.

In 2025, a group of Philadelphia high school students asked a question few adults consider: Where are young people actually welcome to be? To talk and connect with each other? Looking beyond home and school, they felt the city’s “third places” like parks and libraries were scarce, poorly maintained, or uninviting. Their research revealed underfunding at the Parks and Recreation Department, and they decided to focus their efforts on influencing the City Council.

Some students approached the idea of advocacy shaped by prior experiences of being dismissed, or with skepticism or fear. This time was different. With a structured process and the guidance of their civics teacher, they moved from discussing their concerns to researching the issue and practicing civic skills, from analyzing budgets to communicating effectively. By the time they met with the chair and vice chair of the City Council’s Parks and Recreation Committee, they felt confident and respected as community members offering solutions.

At a City Council meeting, they delivered persuasive remarks that helped secure passage of a 2025 resolution formally integrating youth voice into departmental decision-making. City leaders followed through, earning the students’ trust. The students were not learning civics just for a grade; they were practicing democracy in real time.

The Problem

While exemplary, the experience of these young people in Philadelphia is not the norm nationwide. The core problem of the accelerating decay of American democracy is driven not only by actors and conditions in the halls of power but by the context in communities. The democracy crisis sits atop a crisis of hope, a crisis of belonging (marked by isolation and fractured community ties), and a pervasive crisis of trust in institutions. As shared in America’s Promise Alliance’s 2024 State of Young People Report, young people in the United States are increasingly disillusioned with democratic institutions: Only 12 percent trust government leaders, with trust even lower among Black and Hispanic youth. Only 16 percent believe democracy is working for them. Yet the data also reveal an entry point for a future for democratic participation: 65 percent of young people trust their peers, pointing to the potential of classroom-based civic learning and local problem solving to rebuild civic confidence.

As noted in Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka’s article “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools,” given the challenges of the present, one wonders whether we have sufficient civic infrastructure to resist the lure of raw individualism: “After all, following decades of emphasizing schools’ individual economic returns, even talking about education as having a common purpose is akin to recalling a forgotten language. What, then, is the purpose of public schools to our changing and diverse democracy?”

Schools remain collective spaces—in fact the largest remaining collective space in America. The kindergarten mat is most young people’s first public square beyond family, where children practice values first learned at home and norms set by their teachers and each other. School routines often set the rhythm of kids’ lives, and offer on-ramps via classes and clubs for their interests and potential to unfold, alongside their friends. Youth learn they are not only passive recipients of school culture but, in the best scenarios, they shape it as their artwork or club flyers dot the walls, their voices fill auditoriums with speeches and art, and their athletics inspire the entire community to gather.

Instead of seeing these features of schools as a distraction from test scores, we have an opportunity to build from young people’s identity as members of their school community to their civic identity as residents of their town, city, and state. Schools can be designed for collective progress through project-based learning, group projects, and youth voice shaping decisions. This is an alternative to prioritizing individual success alone, focused only on how students stand out and above their peers. A healthy balance of teamwork and individual contribution prepares the rising generation for participation in community organizations, councils, and deliberative bodies to make decisions.

This pivotal moment demands that we intentionally support schools to rise to their true calling: to prepare the guardians of our inalienable rights and founders of America’s next century. It is our civic duty to equip students not merely to inherit this nation but to actively lead its democratic renaissance, armed with the critical thinking and moral courage to engage in civil dialogue across lines of difference and to discern truth in a world awash with disinformation.

Bright Spots for Democracy

The organization I lead, Generation Citizen (GC), partners with schools nationwide, like the Palumbo school in Philadelphia whose students successfully advocated for a City Council resolution. We share our community-based civics curriculum and then train and coach educators who integrate GC into their class. To date, since our founding in 2010, we have delivered experiential civics education to nearly 250,000 students across geographically and politically diverse communities.

A key pedagogical component of this education is project-based learning (PBL). This approach allows middle and high school students to engage in real-world projects that address local issues they identify, developing civic knowledge of how the government works and applying it to solve problems. Instead of just memorizing facts and dates, students conduct research, interview community members with different perspectives, meet with elected officials, and advocate for positive change.

This shift from spectator to active participant is especially crucial for civic education. It creates the conditions for students to communicate and collaborate with each other and adults, work across lines of difference, experience a sense of belonging and agency in their towns.

For example, in rural Meeker, Oklahoma, a high school student led a Generation Citizen project focused on her hometown's lack of community involvement. After discovering that residents often support businesses outside of Meeker and don’t participate in local events, she assembled a team to create a promotional video highlighting the town’s businesses, churches, and other assets.

San Francisco high school students stepped up as community problem solvers by tackling the housing crisis facing “Transitional Age Youth,” young adults aged 18 to 24 who are often moving out of the foster care or probation systems and who face steep barriers to independence and are at higher risk of homelessness. Through a community-based civics project, they engaged SF Supervisor Matt Dorsey, sharing data and personal stories to advocate for the funding and policy changes needed to secure stable housing for their peers.

Democratic practice remains most accessible and tangible at the community level, where young people can see the impact of their efforts and begin to feel a sense of civic agency and belonging, no matter the circumstances at the federal level.

Investing in Our Greatest Civic Asset

While recognizing the incredible power of a semester or year of hands-on civic learning in the critical adolescent period, there are important civic learning stepping stones both before and after those years that are essential to spur a renaissance in civic engagement. In articulating the different but complementary roles of families, community institutions, schools, and government we can honor their interdependence and invest in the strengths of each.

1. Civic Values Begin in Early Childhood, at Home: Children’s socialization begins in infancy, as they observe how family members engage with them, each other, and the world around them. Research on early brain development indicates strong influences by babies’ regular interactions with caregivers, including that their brains start to form expectations for how they will be treated and how they should respond. This first stepping stone establishes core values like fairness, responsibility, and empathy, as trusted caregivers nurture a child's sense of belonging. Faith and cultural organizations play a role in communicating shared norms and hosting service and connection between families that are foundational for a child’s understanding of themselves as part of a community.
2. Foundational Civic Knowledge Through Elementary School: According to a 2021 Fordham Institute report, “Most of the states with the strongest civics and US History standards take an ambitious approach to both subjects in the elementary years.” In many states, but not all, students in early grades begin to learn about the Constitution, three branches of government, and social movements that provide essential scaffolding for their identity formation as community members and more complex history and civics in later years. The elementary years also offer families an opportunity to volunteer together and have age-appropriate conversations about current events.
3. Experiential Civic Learning in Middle and High School: This crucial stepping stone, exemplified by the work at Generation Citizen and other organizations outlined in a recent report by the Council on Civic Strength, builds on civic knowledge and adds civic skills like communication, teamwork, and critical thinking through project-based learning. Comprehensive, experiential civics education, delivered through trusting relationships with teachers and community leaders, can counter civic despair and polarization and prepare young people to collectively build a healthy, resilient democracy. Opportunities for youth voice and service with peers encourage further exploration of pathways to civic engagement and leadership.
4. Service Opportunities for Young Adults: Institutionalizing a year of service through programs like AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, or state-level initiatives such as the Maryland Service Year Option and the One Utah Service Fellowship is a powerful public strategy to address real community needs. By applying civic skills to real-world systems, young people discover a clear sense of purpose while building durable career skills. Developmentally, this provides a "rite of passage," allowing young adults to transition into adulthood with a supportive cohort. Particularly in a moment with concerns about the impact of AI on early career opportunities, this shared experience can offer concrete entry-level experience.
5. Continuous Civic Contribution for Adults: In adulthood, civic participation should reach its fullest expression, yet for many it quietly fades. Recent Social Connection in America data shows that social nonparticipation is now the norm, for instance: “Over the past year, the majority of US adults report never participating in clubs and organizations (67 percent), religious services (51 percent), getting together with neighbors to do something positive in their neighborhood (63 percent), or formal volunteering (58 percent).” This erosion of associational life weakens the informal leadership and shared responsibility that democracy depends on. Adults need accessible, flexible on-ramps into neighborhood groups, volunteer efforts, and civic associations that foster belonging while building leadership capacity. As the culmination of civic development, sustained adult participation strengthens well-being, counters isolation, and ensures democratic leadership is practiced daily, and then passed on to the next generation. Large employers and elected officials can encourage volunteerism and civic participation in their communities.

Based on the fractured and tense circumstances we find ourselves in, this civic journey, from early childhood through adulthood, cannot be sustained by individual or familial effort alone. It depends on a shared civic infrastructure that is intentional, well-resourced, and coordinated across sectors. Today, civic learning and engagement systems remain fragmented, underfunded, and increasingly politicized and weak.

On civic learning policy, state leaders have many strong examples to learn from as bipartisan pathways already exist for strengthening civic learning at the state level. Legislatures can look to Massachusetts and Illinois, where civics requirements signal that civic readiness is a core public responsibility. Regulators can draw lessons from New Hampshire’s performance-based assessments and Tennessee’s project-based civics model, which embed civic learning in real-world application rather than rote compliance. Standards setters can follow Oregon’s lead by aligning inquiry-driven learning, social and emotional development, and informed civic action with a clear commitment to equity and justice. These approaches point to a coherent agenda: make civic learning relevant, rigorous, measurable, and sustained over time. The question is no longer whether this can be done, but whether states will choose to invest in the democratic capacity of the next generation.

Local and state collective impact efforts offer a practical path forward. Models that have strengthened public health and education show what is possible when schools, nonprofits, businesses, and public agencies align around shared goals and measures. Applying this approach to civic development would encourage civic readiness to be cultivated consistently over time, and reinforce civil society’s potential to reduce polarization and encourage pluralism. With deliberate coordination, communities can invest together in the leadership, relationships, and problem-solving capacity a resilient democracy requires.

As John Dewey observed, “[Democracy] has to be born anew every generation, and education is its midwife.” If we want a participatory and inclusive democracy, examples like the students in Philadelphia need to be the norm and not just a bright spot. To raise generations of community problem solvers with a greater sense of civic purpose than today’s adults, we must invest in them now. We need civic learning pathways that foster hope and agency while helping every student feel a sense of belonging and responsibility. By building their knowledge and skills as they grow, we can ensure the next generation is ready to participate in the project of self-governance. And they just may go on to start projects and movements that inspire their elders to join them.

In their article “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools,” Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka rightly decried “education’s slow but steady drift from its democratic function,” and presciently called for “a bolder, broader purpose for public schools in our changing multiracial democracy.” As the former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the US Department of Education, I agree, and I view the current unraveling even of aspirational American democracy as a distressing outgrowth of our failure to teach the many millions of students in both public and private schools the tools necessary to sustain it. But we have the capacity to recover. We have guideposts for how to do it, and I join McGuire and Wilka in urging our nation’s educators, parents, and policy makers to pick them up and follow.

In fact, the work I do in the democracy center I now lead, the Edley Center on Law and Democracy at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, focuses on just those aims. Responding to this dangerous time of national regression and civics crisis, the Edley Center promotes democracy education, civic participation, and equal treatment under law. We publish reports and host convenings to equip democracy defenders with the knowledge and tools needed to support American democracy. In so doing, we aim to shore up the healthy information environment, civic engagement training, and public trust on which a healthy democracy depends.

The conversation McGuire and Wilka started in their article calls on educators, education policy makers, and leaders to imagine a practice of educating as if our democracy depends on it. An extension of that work is preparing young people to grapple with facts when the facts are contested and giving students the tools they need to see and understand today’s social and economic challenges. We must understand and cultivate the enabling conditions associated with the democratic purposes of education. And we must appreciate the equalizing role the states and the federal government should be playing in helping public schools pursue their civic mission.

Practicing Democracy in Our Schools

The schools we provide to the students we cherish must be places that welcome them, nurture them, and teach them both facts and how to understand and act on facts. As education leaders, parents, and adults in this country, we must understand and act on the principle that effective education is equal in its opportunity. Its success rests not only on grade-level performance achieved but on nurturing the capacity to discern, test, and debate as independent and successful thinkers.

Within and across schools, this work includes treating every lesson in every class as a lesson in democratic participation. Concretely, that means: Science teachers who teach scientific inquiry must be conscious, while teaching the periodic table of elements, that they are also teaching students how to challenge, test, and dispute; to be open to proof and to findings that are counterintuitive; and to act on evidence-based conclusions—all of which are essential skills for democratic participation.

Likewise, language arts teachers who teach students their letters and literacy in languages other than English can direct their students to debate current events in a language that is not their home language, forcing students to engage in issues they care about with the mastery of language that is foreign to them. Similarly, teachers of younger children are teaching democratic engagement skills when they teach their students to keep their hands to themselves, to wait their turn in line, and to push other students on the swings while awaiting their own turn for a ride. In learning those lessons, young children are learning how to participate in community and that communities thrive when we respect, include, and support each other.

Doing that work right must mean that we do not leave its satisfaction to the vagaries of individual teachers’ creativity and instead treat it as curricular necessity and a component of educational leadership. It requires that we attend to the key enabling conditions. Our leadership and teacher training programs as well as state curriculum policies need to incorporate democratic purpose as an explicit goal. And our schools need to provide the necessary resources for learning—decent school facilities, trained teachers in every classroom who lead with high expectations for every one of their students, and instructional materials students can access at school and at home, as well as rigorous courses available in sequence for every student’s access to them—on an equal basis across all our schools. Otherwise, we train students in under-resourced schools away from civic engagement. As Professor Michelle Fine explained in an expert report for a school equality suit that I among others litigated 20 years ago: “The likelihood of democratic engagement by these youths and young adults is fundamentally threatened by their experiences in these schools.” I have been grateful, in my work at the Edley Center on Law and Democracy, to speak with educators around the country about education practices for democratic engagement, affirming what governing law actually is, and practicing with them what it takes to educate with democratic purpose.

Misguided Federal Education Policy

I am both dismayed by and mindful of the distance between what the governing law actually requires and what the rhetoric, policy aims, and enforcement practices are today at the federal level. Today’s federal rhetoric claims to return education to the states. Yet the federal government is now more directive than ever regarding what can be taught, thought, and understood in schools. They threaten to withhold funds from schools for engaging in racially inclusive actions that no court has actually outlawed while simultaneously reinterpreting federal sex discrimination requirements in ways that would cause compliant school communities actually to violate binding federal court precedent. These efforts serve to confuse and misdirect educators, parents, and families nationwide, claiming that practices that are perfectly lawful, effective, and good policy somehow violate the law.

These among other federal misdirections cry out for an educated populace who can discern fact from fiction and who are equipped to use the tools of democracy to uphold our constitution and laws.

To be clear, our national failure to educate with democracy in mind is not what caused us to live now in the fastest democratic decline of any democracy on earth to date. This historical moment has many progenitors. Nonetheless, now and in any time, a well-educated public who know and have practice using democratic tools will be better equipped to ensure that the government is responsive to the people and functions as our nation’s laws command.

We also have recent as well as longstanding evidence of the consequences when we fail to heed the democratic purpose of education. In the early weeks and months following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attacks in Israel, we witnessed an astonishing proliferation of reported hate incidents in schools, including an instructor reportedly separating students by national origin and denigrating them for the countries they come from, community members assaulting students because they are perceived to be from a specific region of the world, and students barring other students from accessing parts of campuses because of their identities.

At their core, hate incidents in schools impart lessons in devaluation and exclusion that are antithetical to a healthy democracy. The ugly reports that captured national attention and outrage following October 7, 2023 underscore a crying need for democracy training in school: training in how to disagree without denigrating persons because of who they are, training in how to learn from opposing viewpoints and effectively argue against them, and training in how to question received wisdom while learning canons.

Civil Rights and Education for Democracy

I was the chief civil rights enforcer in the nation’s schools during both the second term of the Obama administration and the Biden administration. Before and after the Hamas attack against Israel, I witnessed, and confirmed through case investigation, to my horror, the degree to which P-12 schools as well as colleges and universities across the country failed to fulfill their statutory obligation to ensure that hostile environments, limiting or denying students’ equal access to education, did not and do not proliferate. These failures violate Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Our legal response at the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) included work to educate the public, including educators in schools. We devoted more resources than any other time in history to eradicate discrimination of this type, opening and resolving more cases for investigation on this topic than in any prior administration, securing resolution agreements during the Biden administration from five times as many schools and school districts than OCR secured during the prior administration, issuing more policy resources addressing this topic than in any prior administration, and providing technical assistance training to school communities throughout the country to explain applicable civil rights laws and our complaint and investigation process.

A more distant, and similarly pernicious, example confirms why civil rights protection and enforcement are important links for education and democracy. For five years, from 1959 to 1964, one of the school districts that had been the subject of the Brown v. Board of Education litigation closed every single public school in the district rather than fulfill courts’ mandates to integrate its public schools to satisfy the Constitution. This district, Prince Edward County in Farmville, Virginia, chose not to operate any public schools at all and instead opened putatively private academies for white students, leaving some nearly 2,000 Black children without schooling. On the first day of school in September 1959, “14 buses helped ferry 1,475 white students to the private academy, while 1,700 black children stood and watched.” Families pursued litigation to correct the unconstitutional condition of education in their community, the United States Department of Justice intervened to support these families’ pursuit of education justice, and still the Black children of Farmville, Virginia lost education while time passed without schooling. Finally, the newly inaugurated Kennedy administration instigated and supported the creation of the Prince Edward County Free School Association, supported through private funds nationwide, to offer integrated schooling to the students of Farmville.

Farmville is simultaneously a lesson about the arc of justice turning toward righteousness through collective will and a remarkably ugly lesson in what is lost while communities wait for the justice arc to bend. At bottom, though, the Prince Edward experience teaches that education away from democracy can be overcome, with improved school conditions for the students and a national community willing to pitch in—with school children’s allowance pennies, with teachers’ and administrators’ talent and skill, with attorneys’ and politicians’ leadership, and with families’ willingness to take risks for their children’s future—to deliver meaningful educational opportunity.

Particularly in this time, when we dangerously lean toward inequality and subjugation in schools, with federal leadership turning away from democracy and toward autocracy, we need to rally a national consensus around our core aspirations for education. Instead of presidential executive orders directing what skewed version of history can be taught in schools or weaponizing our civil rights laws or devaluing science, this nation’s education community must work together to generate and sustain free inquiry, community engagement, and sound and thorough knowledge foundations. Just as the nation rallied to open and support schools for Prince Edward, Virginia’s students to learn and thrive together and to recover from years of educational loss and the stigma of separation by race; just as the freedom schools movement built an education foundation for students who had been deprived of opportunity; the nation now needs to build a movement for thorough, robust, free public education for all of our students, one that supports and challenges learners, whoever they are, and encourages their full participation in their communities.

Final Thoughts

This country has long recognized, including in the constitution of every state in the union, the value of education to sustaining democracy. The United States Supreme Court in 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education decision adverted to “the importance of education to our democratic society” when it ruled that racially segregated education by law is unconstitutional. And of course our history long reinforces that education teaches lessons in worth, community engagement, and who counts in our democracy. For the health of our democracy, the school lessons we commit ourselves to now must include the practice of democratic engagement together with the knowledge and skills foundations we expect our nation’s learners to come to know. Failing to keep sight of this core purpose of education will translate into formally educated graduates who lack the skill and practice of democratic engagement, leaving them unable to uphold the guardrails that sustain democracy.

Preparing young people to participate and govern means moving beyond entrusting civic learning to a single course in high school or an elective on campus. Yes, young people should still learn how a bill becomes a law, but they will also need schools and communities that inculcate their agency and voice, curricula that promote inquiry into problems relevant to their lives, and educators who are trained to nurture civic skills and dispositions.

Picking up on McGuire and Wilka’s charge, I urge a simple but crucial shift in our theory and practice of schooling, to drive the democracy sustaining purpose of education. Our schools of education must—as the University of California at Berkeley School of Education, for example, does—be explicit with students and faculty that they educate as if democracy depends on it. And our classrooms, at every level of education, must operate with that same principle, aiming to teach subject-specific lessons while also teaching young people how to think, how to engage, and how to participate in communities, because these also are core purposes of education.

In early 2025, a university in Beirut quietly hit the cumulative break-even point on a philanthropically funded initiative. No one at the funding foundation was running its day-to-day operations. No one at the university had asked for more money. But in the midst of everything else that was happening—currency collapse, the aftermath of the Beirut port explosion, broad political crisis, and ongoing regional conflict—the university’s leadership had decided, on its own, to replicate the initiative’s model across additional departments.

This is not exactly a sustainability success story, but a different category of outcome, one the philanthropic field does not yet have a standard to recognize, let alone measure. It is the question of whether a grant has built something permanent, something structural, and something that outlasts the grant itself.

The initiative is the Abdulla Al Ghurair Hub for Digital Teaching and Learning at the American University of Beirut (AUB), built with capital from the Abdulla Al Ghurair Foundation (AGF). It is not a program or a platform, but an institutional nerve center for online innovation in higher education: the integrating architecture that brings together faculty, technology, governance, revenue, and delivery into a single structure the university owns and operates.

By the time it broke even, our foundation’s role was almost finished. Not because we walked away, but because the design makes our presence unnecessary. And that outcome was not luck. It was architecture. And the difference between the two is the most important conversation philanthropy is not having.

The Measurement Gap That Distorts the Field

Philanthropy has become sophisticated about many things. Our theories of change, results frameworks, adaptive management, and learning agendas have improved practice. They have not, however, resolved a structural blind spot: the field’s dominant metrics are almost entirely bounded by the grant period. We count enrollments, beneficiaries reached, programs launched, outputs delivered. We report these numbers with precision and sincerity, and we answer the question “Did the money do something?”

These metrics do not answer the question that actually determines strategic philanthropic value: “Did the money change something permanently?”

These are categorically different questions. Conflating them allows philanthropic capital that sustains activity only while present to be evaluated by the same standard as capital that fundamentally rewires how an institution operates. A grant that funds 10,000 training sessions and a grant that transforms how a workforce system designs training can look identical in a final report. They are not identical.

This distinction matters because it should shape how funders design grants, how grantees orient their work, and how the field allocates its most scarce resource: institutional attention. When we cannot distinguish between capital that supports and capital that transforms, we default to the easier one. We fund programs. We build things next to institutions rather than inside them. We discuss sustainability in year three of a five-year grant and treat it as a planning exercise rather than a structural requirement. Then we express surprise when activity decays after departure.

This is not a failure of intention. It is a failure of architecture. And it marks the difference between supportive capital and architectural capital.

Supportive Capital vs. Architectural Capital

Supportive capital funds activity within existing systems. It strengthens what institutions already do, adds capacity, enables delivery. It is time-bound by nature, and its effects are contingent on continuation, either through renewed funding or through the institution’s own decision to absorb costs. And supportive capital is legitimate, necessary, and often effective. Most philanthropic capital operates this way.

However, architectural capital does something different: it changes the underlying operating logic of an institution. It reshapes how decisions are made, how governance functions, how revenue is generated, and how performance is measured, so that sustaining the new model becomes the institution’s rational self-interest rather than a burden it bears out of obligation or inertia. When architectural capital is deployed well, departure is not a risk to be managed, but a milestone that validates the design.

The critical difference is where the locus of control sits at every stage of the work. In a supportive model, the funder enables. In an architectural model, the funder reconfigures, and then the institution owns.

That most philanthropic capital is supportive and appropriate for many objectives. But when funders state ambitions of “systems change,” “sustainability,” or “lasting impact,” they are making an architectural claim. The question is whether their grant design matches that claim. In practice, it rarely does.

What Architectural Design Looks Like in Practice

The Al Ghurair Hub at AUB was among our first educational investments in which we imposed architectural discipline from the outset. The operating environment demanded it, as did our Chairman H.E. Abdul Aziz Al Ghurair, who insisted that philanthropic capital should be held to the same performance standards as business capital. That conviction shaped every design choice that followed.

Moreover, Lebanon’s compounding crises meant that any model dependent on stable external funding, political continuity, or infrastructure reliability would likely fail. Extended support was not a viable long-term strategy. Cautious pilots would produce learning but not durability. We needed to build something that could withstand conditions we could not predict, and the only way to do that was to ensure the institution itself owned the capability entirely.

With this in mind, three design choices defined our approach.

1. Institutional delivery with rigorous accountability from the outset. The Foundation did not embed staff, establish parallel management structures, or assume responsibility for implementation. The American University of Beirut designed, staffed, operated, and owned the Hub through its own institutional systems.

Institutional ownership, however, was paired with structured accountability. Funding was designed from the beginning around performance milestones, with disbursements linked to demonstrable progress and outcomes. The structure preserved autonomy while ensuring that results, not activity, determined continuation of support. While the university owned the work, the Foundation ensured that the work met a level of rigor consistent with the ambition of the initiative.

This arrangement requires discipline on both sides. Funders must resist the impulse to insert themselves into execution while maintaining clear expectations and visibility around outcomes. Institutions, in turn, must perform at a level that justifies the autonomy they retain.

When that balance holds, philanthropic capital can strengthen institutions rather than substitute for them.

2. Governance inside the institution, not alongside it. Oversight of the partnership was agreed on and maintained through a joint Steering Committee composed of senior representatives from the Foundation, AUB, and external stakeholders. The committee served as the highest strategic governance body for the initiative, approving plans and budgets, reviewing progress, and safeguarding the long-term direction of the Hub.

We did not establish an independent donor oversight board or parallel accountability structure. Performance standards, with key performance indicators linked to payment milestones, were embedded in university processes and designed to outlast the grant.

3. Financial sustainability as a design constraint, not a closing aspiration. Revenue generation and cost modeling were integrated from inception. The Hub was structured so that 60 percent of revenue flowed to its designated Hub account, creating a clear path to operational self-sufficiency. This was not a sustainability plan written in year four. It was a structural feature of the model from inception.

Designing for financial sustainability in a context like Lebanon means the ability to adapt financial discipline to reality without abandoning it. When the Lebanese pound collapsed, when conflict disrupted enrollment, and when infrastructure failed, the Foundation did not hold the university to budget lines set four years earlier in a different local reality. We extended timelines to allow the university to achieve its KPIs under conditions none of us had anticipated. We adapted milestones to reflect what was actually happening on the ground, with a laser focus on the final goal: Hub sustainability beyond the grant.

When strategic philanthropy looks beyond bureaucratic donor reporting cycles, it is something different from monitoring compliance from a distance; it means understanding the operating environment deeply enough to distinguish between underperformance and an institution fighting through conditions that would have collapsed lesser models. Rigidity in the face of volatility is not discipline, but abandonment by another name.

The Evidence: What the Numbers Actually Show

Within a few years of operation, the Hub reached operational maturity and financial self-sufficiency within its operating model. In 2023, annual revenues covered annual operating expenses for the first time, marking what AUB’s own financial review describes as the achievement of “operational maturity.” By early 2025, the Hub crossed the cumulative break-even point.

These outcomes matter less for their scale than for the conditions under which they were achieved. The Abdulla Al Ghurair Hub for Digital Teaching and Learning at the American University of Beirut absorbed shocks without operational collapse. The model held because it was structurally sound.

Perhaps the most telling evidence is behavioral rather than financial. Following an internal evaluation of its online education strategy, AUB’s leadership chose to evolve its approach by replicating the Hub’s architecture across the university. The decision was not prompted by the Foundation but driven by university’s own assessment that the Hub’s design offered solutions to challenges while creating opportunities for strategic growth and broader impact. When an institution independently transitions from its existing system with the model philanthropic capital helped establish, the outcome is transformation.

The Post-Funding Test

Many initiatives persist after a grant is completed, whether through extraordinary individual effort, residual goodwill, institutional inertia, or another opportune grant. The stronger test is whether the institution’s incentives, governance structures, and operational logic have shifted such that maintaining the new model is still the rational choice.

The test is simple: Could the institution revert to its prior way of operating without actively dismantling systems now embedded in its practice that produces better results?

At AUB, reverting would require removing integrated KPIs, unwinding revenue structures, and abandoning processes the university has already chosen to extend to other departments. That would not be a program winding itself down. It marks an institution that has changed how it works.

A Standard the Field Has Not Yet Required of Itself

The measurement systems that would enforce this distinction do not yet exist at field level. No major philanthropic network systematically tracks post-funding institutional behavior. The sector’s most prestigious reporting mechanisms remain overwhelmingly bounded by the grant period.

A systematic effort to document post-grant institutional behavior across philanthropic portfolios would allow the field to test this distinction empirically. It would also provide the evidence needed to understand when architectural capital succeeds, when it fails, and under what institutional conditions durable change actually takes hold.

This is a solvable problem. It requires funders to commit to post-grant assessment as standard practice and to hold themselves accountable for what remains, not only for what they produce.

The Abdulla Al Ghurair Hub at the American University of Beirut is only one case. But while it doesn’t prove that architectural capital always works, it shows that when the design is disciplined, the institution is capable, and the funder acts like an investor who is willing to hold the line on outcomes while adapting to the world as it actually is, philanthropic capital can leave behind something an institution would not willingly give up.

And that is the bar the field needs to set. Every year it delays, another generation of grants will end, and the question will go unasked: What, if anything, did we actually change?

“We’re just trying to survive,” a social enterprise leader told us recently. “We’re doing things here and there with AI but haven’t made sense of it across the organization. I know we need to spend more time thinking about it.”

As funders, advisors, and board members of social impact organizations, we hear versions of this often. Funders are asking about AI strategy, boards are pushing for pilots, and staff are experimenting without direction, but many leaders understandably feel unsure how to begin more strategic, comprehensive conversations.

A good place to start is by asking four foundational questions that clarify opportunities, assess organizational readiness, and help determine the right boundaries and pacing. While not comprehensive, these offer a practical, board-ready agenda to establish shared framing and serve as an anchor for early strategy discussions.

Question 1: AI for What?

The first questions many boards ask about AI are: How are we using AI? Which tools should we adopt? That is almost always the wrong place to begin.

Before discussing tools, risks, or investments, leaders need to help their board or executive team clarify AI’s relevance: What problems are we trying to solve? What opportunities are we hoping to unlock? Framed this way, AI becomes a strategy conversation, not a technology one.

To make this conversation concrete, it’s important to step back and consider the kinds of challenges and ambitions the organization commonly faces and how they vary in scale. A simple way to structure that thinking is by positioning the organization’s opportunities along a spectrum, with more incremental, productivity-oriented needs (such as improving internal efficiency or reducing administrative burden) on one end and transformational, mission-centric ambitions (such as expanding reach or improving outcomes at scale) on the other. Other categorizing frameworks include FastForward’s AI-Powered Nonprofits use case categories, Tech Matters’ Nonprofit AI Treasure Map, and NIST AI Use Taxonomy: A Human Centered-Approach.

From there, it’s helpful to consider specific AI use cases as illustrative models for pursuing those needs and ambitions. Including both incremental and more ambitious possibilities makes options tangible without committing to action. A few good sources of cases are Patrick J. McGovern Foundation's (PJMF) AI Use Case Library and AI for Good's Impact Report.

The aim of these exercises is to develop some shared language and structure for evaluating where AI might meaningfully advance the organization’s goals before deciding if and how it should proceed. If the goal is to strengthen internal capacity (on the productivity end of the spectrum), for example, the question to ask might be: How can we reduce administrative burden and free up time for higher-value work? Use cases might include examples of organizations using AI to draft communications, summarize meetings, or automate repetitive workflows. For instance, Generation.org, which provides job training and placement, created a custom GPT based on its own data to streamline curriculum design and review, significantly reducing time spent on both tasks.

If the goal is to expand access to a service or resource (on the transformational side of the spectrum), the question might be: How can we enable our services or resources to reach people who can’t currently access them? Organizations that use AI to shift tasks to non-specialists, unlock access to capital through improved systems, or connect with previously unreachable markets might serve as use cases. Apollo Agriculture, for example, uses a predictive AI credit risk assessment tool to sustainably extend loans to smallholder farmers who lack credit histories. (See Table 1 for more examples.)

Question 2: What Will It Take?

If the first question clarifies AI’s purpose, the second grounds it in reality: What will it take for us to do this well? AI adoption, especially for more transformative ambitions, begins with readiness, and some foundational components can take years and significant resources to build. From our research, three dimensions most strongly shape the length and slope of an organization’s AI adoption curve: its relationship with technology, its learning culture, and the domain in which it operates. Here’s a look at each.

Technology: Effective AI projects depend on high-quality data, robust data infrastructure, and technical talent. Organizations where technology is not already central to strategy and delivery must assess whether building this capacity is a near-term priority, a longer-term aspiration, or outside their strategic path altogether.

While “AI-native” organizations are emerging and face their own challenges, particularly around trust and implementation, in broad terms and for the purposes of this article, most organizations fall into one of three profiles:

• Tech-lite: Makes limited use of technology across operations and programs; data systems may be fragmented or minimal
• Tech-using: Effectively uses general technology (such as CRM systems and digital tools) as a supportive layer, but technology is not core to the model
• Tech-forward: Embeds technology as a central pillar to the organization’s strategy or delivery model, often accompanied by staffing, structured data systems, and analytic capability

Honest assessment can help organizations understand where their climb may be steeper, and anchor strategy discussions in the realities of data, systems, and talent investment.

A note re: hiring. Boards can gravitate quickly toward hiring technical talent, but that’s rarely the best first step. Organizations should consider a staged “dosing strategy” that builds broad AI literacy internally first, then invests in targeted expertise (internal or external) that aligns with priorities. External expertise can include consultants, board members, or tech volunteer programs such as Mapbox, Tech to the Rescue, and Moving Worlds.

Learning culture: AI adoption is rarely linear; it requires experimentation, iteration, and a willingness to pivot when assumptions prove wrong. Organizations with strong learning cultures use data to question, refine, and improve, and are better positioned to explore AI responsibly. Leaders should ask: Do we use data primarily as a tool for reporting and upward accountability, or do we encourage the use of data for surfacing uncomfortable truths and adapting in real time?

When discussing this dimension with the board or leadership team, the goal is not critique but clarity. If experimentation and shared learning are informal or inconsistent, investing in cultural or internal system shifts may be as important as investing in new technology.

Domain: Context shapes readiness. Some fields, such as climate and agriculture, may benefit from relatively rich datasets, fewer individual privacy constraints, and a history of digital experimentation. Others—such as health, land rights, or gender-based violence—operate in highly regulated and deeply sensitive environments where risks to vulnerable populations are significant.

Leaders need to consider how their organization’s context shapes opportunity, regulation, and risk, and bring examples from comparable organizations to illustrate how others have navigated these trade-offs. Where are datasets abundant and risks manageable? How do regulation and compliance shape what data they can collect or use? What level of complexity and potential harm does the context introduce to different AI applications?

These questions are not theoretical. In practice, different domains yield very different AI pathways depending on how organizations assess and manage risk. For example, in agriculture, organizations such as Digital Green have found that direct-to-user tools like agronomy chatbots can be both effective and relatively low-risk, supported by abundant localized data and clear use cases. In more sensitive domains, the same approach may not be appropriate. In the gender-based violence field, the nonprofit tech organization Chayn discontinued an AI-enabled chatbot pilot supporting survivors after determining that the risks, particularly around unintended use, were too great given the context. This does not mean AI has no role to play. Rather, it may be better suited to more indirect applications of AI, for example, DataGénero’s use of AI to help criminal courts collect and make legal data on gender violence publicly available. (For more insights on domain, see AI Access Initiative’s paper, “AI for Good: Cross-Sector Analysis.”)

Question 3: How Do We Lead Through This?

Levels of excitement and apprehension about AI vary widely across organizations; among mission-driven professionals working to address market and systemic failures, skepticism is both common and justified. Concerns include environmental and labor costs; bias; privacy violations; and broader societal impacts on employment, democracy, and sustainability. At the same time, AI offers real potential to advance social and environmental progress, particularly as organizations confront complexity and resource constraints. Vilas Dhar, president of PJMF, reflected to us, "The loudest voices on AI are selling hype or warning of collapse. Neither is a strategy. True leadership in this moment means holding challenge and possibility at once, moving together with the hope of AI."

The task for leaders isn’t to resolve these tensions immediately but to acknowledge them openly, hold them constructively, and create space for informed, principled exploration within that hopeful middle ground. One practical way to do this is to establish guardrails early on, first inviting board and staff to identify the risks that matter most in the organization’s context, and then translating those into a set of responsible AI principles, or shared commitments, that shape the evaluation, deployment, and governance of AI. Responsible AI principles consider fairness, transparency, human centeredness, data privacy and security, inclusion, and sustainability.

This process grounds the exploration of AI in ethics and aligns it with the organization’s mission, providing clarity that helps everyone move forward with greater confidence and balance. Again here, it’s helpful to draw on examples from organizations working with similar opportunities and constraints. In the case of Jacaranda Health, for instance, applying AI in maternal health means prioritizing clear user consent, designing for the most vulnerable people, ensuring that trained professionals vet AI-generated responses, and maintaining affordability to enable scale. PJMF’s Responsible AI module can support the development of principles, and questions from FastForward’s Nonprofit AI Policy Builder can help guide discussion on appropriate internal AI use.

Question 4: What Pace Is Right for Us?

The private sector often frames AI adoption as a race to deploy faster, automate more, and “fail fast” to reduce costs and capture market share. But social impact organizations operate under a different mandate, with different stakes. A flawed chatbot can give pregnant women dangerous advice. A biased credit scoring model can deepen exclusion. As a result, organizations must move at the speed of trust. Operational commitments to inclusion, safeguarding, and compliance—often based on responsible AI principles—must shape the pacing and scope of adoption.

Leaders need to outline what those commitments require in terms of process, resources, and timelines. For example, as Jacaranda Health expands access to its AI-powered maternal health chatbot, PROMPTS, it must form partnerships with local health systems and providers, rigorously validate messaging accuracy, adapt to different regulatory environments, and build trust with frontline workers and patients. This diligence takes time and resources, and as AI adoption accelerates globally, funders and partners may push for speed. Clearly articulating why pace is a strategic decision rooted in impact, ethics, and trust—not a reaction to fear or inertia—helps set realistic expectations with boards, partners, and funders. This ensures that innovation strengthens rather than detracts from the mission. (PJMF’s operationalization of AI principles throughout the development of its financial due diligence tool, and NetHope’s case studies across health, education, and agriculture offer inspiration.)

Taking the Next Step

No matter what the starting point or how steep the path, the development of any AI strategy should be iterative. By clarifying “AI for what?,” assessing readiness across technology, learning culture, and domain, holding skepticism and hope in constructive tension, and letting impact imperatives set the pace, leaders can equip their board and team with something more valuable than quick answers: a shared understanding. And from there, they can move forward deliberately, setting strategy and milestones, identifying partners, testing, investing, or pausing as readiness and alignment dictate.

On March 30, 2026, Sonja Santelises and Mike Matsuda joined Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka, the authors of “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools,” for a discussion about leading school districts toward a more democratic purpose. Sonja serves as the CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools in Baltimore, Md., a post she has held since 2016. Mike recently retired as the Superintendent of Anaheim Union High School in Anaheim, Calif., a district that he led for 11 years. Both Sonja and Mike are nationally esteemed education system leaders, with unique perspectives on how to bridge the school system of the future with the realities of the schools we have today.

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Kent McGuire: At times, I think our discourse about education resembles how we talk about the economy when we are in a depression. Instead of a sagging Dow Jones Industrial Average, we focus on key indicators like absenteeism, student mental health, student engagement, and persistently low student achievement. Meanwhile, the expansion of education savings accounts and tax credits, and the emergence of AI raise questions about the viability of our public schools. Matt and I have argued that the health of our democracy is linked to the health of our education system. We’d love each of you to speak to how education and democracy are or should be linked, and the implications for what happens in our schools.

Mike Matsuda: I’m going to start with a T-shirt I wear: “Democracy is a verb.” It’s used by the George W. Bush Foundation and by Mikva—on the right and on the left, people are saying democracy is a verb, just like love is a verb. Unfortunately, over the decades, what we’ve put to the side is the role of schools as models of democracy—places where students can have a sense of voice and belonging, where they can have a stake in the system and even disagree on issues without hatred. It’s called civil discourse. Everybody’s talking about belonging and voice, but not intentionally connecting it to democracy. It’s more than just a civics class. It's an opportunity for kids to begin the process of inquiry through solving problems relevant to them. We need to position democracy as an action verb, and schools can facilitate student voice, belonging, and action by shifting the curriculum and learning experiences during the school day and beyond.

Sonja Santelises: Thank you, Mike, I agree with this idea of democracy as a verb. What I’ve been experiencing is that schools have neglected the fundamental knowledge and understanding of the principles of democracy, which we are seeing in the inability of larger segments of the public to engage in messy but fruitful and goal-oriented ways. It has led, in a lot of cases, to generations of people who do not know how to handle conflict productively.

We've had explosions around democracy throughout history, and we’ve not spent enough time giving students the time and space to explore what democracy means. We either do it in the dry, “fill out the history worksheet of the four principles,” or we have what I began to see in Baltimore about 10 years ago, with young people acting on democracy without a fundamental understanding of what being in this democracy of the United States actually means.

I believe schools have oriented young people to almost a democratic cosplay: we know how to make signs; we know to protest what we don’t like. But it is very different from the problem-solving that previous generations were prepared to undertake. Too many young people are chanting for the overthrow of democracy and the inefficiency of democracy, and they’ve never engaged in any other form of government. They’ve never engaged in the challenges of what democracy meant in ancient Greece or what it meant in the Jim Crow South from 1910 to 1930. So the rigor of what we expect for this generation, particularly generations of first-gen college-goers, multilingual students, and students of color, for me is watered down.

That’s why I call it cosplay: they flood a boardroom, they go and testify, and part of the pressure testing we had to do in Baltimore was recognizing that because these were children of color, we were saying “it’s just good for you to get your voice out there.” But at this point in my career, I actually have a little trigger when people say “student voice.” In so many cases, student voice means students going unprepared into public space to represent their ideas without being ready to experience the rigor of pushback on those ideas, which for me is fundamental in a democracy. It’s part of what we’re seeing play out in the public sphere—people don’t know how to disagree anymore.

Matt Wilka: How do you think about the public vs. private good of education, individual vs. collective, especially when you’re talking to parents who want what’s best for their kids, or when you’re talking to community members outside the school walls?

Mike Matsuda: I’m sure you are familiar with the Japanese term of “ikigai,” of your purpose, right? That’s what we need to get back to, those four components: finding joy, finding what you’re good at, finding what’s going to make the world better, and finding what you can make money from. That third one—making the world better—is what we’re missing. Of course, parents want their individual kids to do well, but they also want their kids to do well in a collective society. We are missing a fundamental principle of democracy, The Preamble to the Constitution begins with ‘We’ not ‘I’. We need to instill a we into our schools so kids can grow into empathetic adults.

Instructionally, if teachers start looking at the classroom as a microcosm of society, a lot of problem-solving can happen. Right now, AI is the big thing, and teachers are developing lessons connecting AI to energy consumption—where's that energy going to come from? You can’t solve that from one country’s perspective alone. We can’t solve issues like climate change thinking only about the “I.” But it depends on how the North Star of the district is framed. The ikigai and collective responsibility need to be baked in; we need a North Star for schools that starts with the collective good.

Sonja Santelises: What is essential for the future is building back this notion of the common good. What are the things we all agree on first? Because we’re not going to agree on everything. For diverse families, not everybody’s benchmark is whether their child goes to the University of Maryland. For some, it’s whether they’re able to get a job to sustain a family in an industry that’s not going away.

Part of the role of the superintendent—or whatever educational leader form we’ll have in 10 or 15 years—is to take all those individual wants and shape the messaging and picture so everyone can see themselves in it. I don’t think the common good is always evident in the day-to-day work that occurs. It’s great from a podium in front of a thousand people, but on the everyday, helping to build pictures and examples of how both individual and collective can live side by side is important.

The challenge is equity. Because of history, there’s always suspicion that difference means “less than”—because that’s how it’s played out in the past. There’s always this specter of: Is it equal for all kids? Are there some pathways that will leave certain students out? Leaders have been most successful, in my experience, when they can cast a vision where people see themselves as part of that vision. If I don’t see myself as part of that vision, I’m not going to trust you to take my individual needs into account. I think pre-K through sixth grade, it’s actually easier to do this than we think. The challenging area has always been grades seven through 12, because that's when the dividing lines become evident. That’s where the specters of past inequities make people distrustful.

I’ve had this discussion with folks trying to do national reform who have fabulous ideas. The problem is the equity question. We have to validate that what is different still leads to meaningful outcomes. We have kids in 11th grade who want to be entrepreneurs, who will be ready to open their own construction companies in two years. Forcing them to take AP Physics—I’m not sure it’s a good use of their time. If you talk about things like getting rid of the Carnegie Unit, I’m cool with that. But if you don’t have the guarantee that the new commodity of exchange is still going to signal to people that this other new experience is valid—that it contributes to the good of the community—that’s where it starts to break down.

Particularly in the communities that I come from and that I serve, there is a distrust. People view it as: we cook up all these fabulous new approaches at places like Harvard, then it all falls apart, and it’s their children who end up with the negative consequences. Take an experiential course at Phillips Exeter [an exclusive New England boarding school]—you can go live on a farm and develop sustainable food options. Experiential learning, a class without tests, without grades, it’s an amazing course. But if I give that course in Baltimore without the political signaling that Exeter has, it’s going to carry very different weight. And that’s the political reality that I keep pressing on these reform people, the project-based people—yes, I want that too, but we don’t have a great track record in education of doing it well.

Matt Wilka: Sonja, you’re referencing a package of ideas that have a lot of traction these days—an education system where education happens in the community, on the job, and on higher ed campuses. Where learning is assessed differently, accredited differently, where who delivers it changes, and where the skills prioritized are durable skills, 21st-century skills. That all sounds great on paper, but we also have the system, with its history and politics, that exists today. Given the equity questions that you rightly referenced, what seem like the actual entry points, or paths to walk down, to make progress toward that idealized future?

Sonja Santelises: I think the career piece is one of the best ways. If we, as the designers of career pathways, can own part of where people end up when they come through those pathways, that’s a space where we have agreement. This idea of being an apprentice in a variety of spheres, not just in what we would traditionally call trades—what we have seen is that when young people experience more rapid cycles of applying their learning in real spaces, it creates a level of engagement that current systems are too often not flexible enough to provide.

Those kids I referenced earlier who were going and testifying but we hadn’t prepared well—well, it would have made my father, who was a Morehouse debater, turn in his grave. When we actually had people who knew how to prepare kids for that stage, not with a patronizing “oh, this is cute that the little Black child from Freddie Gray’s neighborhood is coming to speak to us,” but with real rigor—because that’s not how Morehouse does it. Morehouse does it so you really are ready. When we got teachers who would do that, those students got standing ovations in the legislature. Their writing was going to major publications across the state of Maryland because it was solid, because they had spent time on it.

Apprenticeship means academic apprenticeship for kids who want that, as much as it is an apprenticeship for the young man starting his own construction company. Apprenticeship is a big enough space where we can start moving some of the outdated infrastructure—the time-bound, place-bound learning—but still keep the floor underneath of standards. Because I’m tired of people cheering kids who are three years behind grade level coming up with a poster and calling that new ways of learning.

Mike Matsuda: For entry points, I would agree with career pathways, but we should be wary of leaving out what the kid really wants to do. Career pathways might be anchored in public school versions of micro-schools and smaller learning communities as described by the Learning Policy Institute.

Kent McGuire: Given your experience, if you had to put your finger on a couple of things you’d love to see change, what would those be?

Mike Matsuda: When I talk with business leaders about the coming disruption around jobs and AI, there’s tremendous shifting under the surface—very jagged, with some fields completely wiped out. This generation will have to invent new careers. We’re talking in years, not decades. We should be thinking outside the box at this critical juncture looking at redesigning entire systems and not just tinkering at the edges. California is at the forefront leading secondary school system change through its redesign initiative coupled with a four billion dollar investment in community schools.

Moreover, we know there is a growing crisis with college graduates having been severely impacted in the job market, mostly by the effects of AI. According to leaders in the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the young people who are best positioned for jobs are the ones who can manage AI agents for solving problems. Who in the secondary school space is doing that? And that’s just one of the shifts. Schools need to position students to solve problems they care about and can learn to monetize for good. Kids need the ability to iterate with AI agents, becoming co-facilitators of learning with the teachers and AI, and that needs to be captured and assessed. We’re trying to thread the needle of human development and whole child development with applications that lead to the betterment of society.

We’re in an urgent crisis with democracy, with whether this generation of kids feels they can trust us. Why should they trust us? Sonja talked about trust and how it’s deteriorating, and whether these new ideas are going to have any credence with the most marginalized students and families. There’s a lot on the line, and we have to think big about a North Star for education. For years, presidents of both political parties have not thought beyond education as the basics. No one national leader or party has given us an aspirational vision of education in America, in terms of helping to lead us forward.

Sonja Santelises: I appreciate that focus, Mike, on starting with changing what’s happening in schools. When we talk about variability in outcomes, the variability within schools is greater than the variability between schools—that points to Richard Elmore’s instructional core of learner, teacher, content. That’s the nut we’re trying to change. Which means we have to think very differently about teaching, and I don’t just mean pedagogically. We are experiencing a mass shift that is the elephant in the room but we don’t talk about; nobody wants to go into teaching. The pandemic accelerated a challenge that already existed. Teachers experienced whiplash—celebrated as heroes, then vilified. We have not really changed how teachers learn to meet the needs of multiple students.

Connected to that: who is a teacher? We have narrow definitions about who can teach and what you teach, and it’s very outdated and it’s partly driving the teacher shortage. During the pandemic, we looked to our paraprofessionals in Baltimore—they live here, they know you, they’re Auntie May down the street—and because of their proximity to kids, they understood a lot more of the environment that kids were coming from. They actually produced better traditional outcomes in early literacy than some folks with master’s degrees.

When it comes to apprenticeship, the people helping apprentice young people are in many ways more qualified, particularly in the world Mike was describing. I don’t want somebody with a master’s degree in charge of making sure our young people know how to use AI. We need to revamp where we view expertise sitting, and for what end. That’s got to change because we’re not going to have enough people under the traditional definitions to equip young people for the world that we’ve been discussing. We still have third-grade teachers still trying to get basic understanding of math, let alone leverage AI in a major project.

Mike Matsuda: I would say ‘yes, and…’ to Sonja: We do need to double down on apprenticeships, but we also need to double down on entrepreneurship that benefits the we and not just the I. If AI is the complete disruptor, what does that mean for us as K-12 leaders, in terms of that disruption? I would say we need to land back on innovation and creativity and entrepreneurship, so that kids can be able to reinvent their futures. And, as we describe in our new book, The Future of Public Education, teachers must experience the same kind of learning arc anchored in apprenticeships and entrepreneurship as they work in teams that include allied professionals from the community.

Matt Wilka: As a final question, keeping in mind this frame of a future-ready but democratic public system, what’s something that, as a superintendent, you wish you could do but is hard to pull off?

Sonja Santelises: I don’t think it should be so hard to do what the research tells us works best. It’s incredibly frustrating, the time and energy that has to be spent on kids’ reading, on quality early learning from birth to five. We don’t need an AI agent to tell us that piece—we know how to do that! Back to grades pre-K through six, where we’ve got a lot of consensus, it should not be that hard to get those systems right.

The fact that it’s hard takes energy away from doing the other things we’ve been talking about, and that’s frustrating. There are some things that should not be hard. It should not be hard to make sure adolescents have physical activity with sports. It should not be hard to prioritize the development of artistic expression. Those are things we already know. I want my mind space released to then be able to engage with the harder, more open questions that we’ve discussed. That’s what I would say.

Mike Matsuda: I want to go to Jefferson and this concept of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. Life: if you look at blue zones and longevity, that’s really what we need to build—systems and regions where you can live to be 100 years old. There’s a lot that goes into that. Liberty: they’re talking about freedom of thinking, and that’s where you get religious freedom, freedom from oppressive governments that want to control how you think. And then the pursuit of happiness—this collective joy, the happiness of the collective good. Those three concepts of the founders, connecting them to democracy, connecting them to the purpose of schools and the future of this country—there’s a lot to work on there.

Kent McGuire: What I put together from both of you is that we know what we need to do in the early years, pre-K to five or six, and now we should just do it with real vigor. And the redesign issues, challenges, and opportunities for much more innovation are really a secondary school issue, where young people have to be prepared and have to use their minds well—and AI becomes a tool. That’s where there’s such opportunity for real change. Thank you.

These pages have seen much discussion of the various challenges facing impact investors. However, one of the most fundamental barriers to impact investing’s growth is seldom given the attention it deserves: liquidity.

The big debate in impact investing has been on whether there is a financial trade-off between impact and returns, as was explored in Toniic’s 2025 Cruising Altitude report, presenting findings from an eight-year longitudinal study representing more than $3.5 billion of invested assets. However, that study’s findings highlighted another dynamic that many asset allocators have long understood: There is typically an inverse relationship between liquidity and impact. Put simply, liquidity—the ease with which an asset can be converted into cash—is often compromised when investors seek to maximize impact.

There is a logic to this. If an investment is making something happen that otherwise would not—for example, funding new climate technology or building social housing where the market has failed—it is less likely to have a ready-made, liquid market. Additionality often means stepping into spaces where conventional capital is not yet comfortable, and that usually implies higher risk and illiquidity. It follows, therefore, that impact portfolios skew towards private equity, private real estate, and other alternative asset classes that are inherently hard to liquidate.

These are fundamental considerations for asset owners. At Paul Ramsay Foundation, we require income from our investments to meet our grant distribution commitments alongside sufficient liquidity to rebalance our portfolio and generate a return consistent with our desire to be long-term players. While we champion the concept of a “total impact approach”—considering the impact of all the foundation’s assets, rather than only a small percentage through grantmaking—impact investments alone cannot currently meet our requirements for income and liquidity. As a result, our allocation to impact investments is 20 percent, with the remaining 80 percent being sustainably invested using a series of positive and negative screens.

We are not unique among asset owners. In addition to foundations that require liquidity and income to meet statutory or self-imposed distribution requirements, pension funds must make regular benefit payments and meet regulatory parameters, and family offices often require sufficient liquidity to balance philanthropic ambitions with near-term spending needs across generations.

The Challenge

Illiquidity across asset classes has intensified globally. Since 2021, there has been a sharp decline in initial public offerings (IPOs), a common route for private equity and venture capital funds to realize returns. Although 2025 brought some stabilization, the number of IPOs remains well below 2021 levels. While this trend affects all markets, impact investing is particularly vulnerable due to impact investment’s heavy focus on privately held assets and often limited exposure to publicly traded funds that can be more easily bought and sold.

Liquidity barriers preventing greater investment in impact are particularly acute for institutional investors who favor open-ended funds that allow investors to buy and sell units, offering flexibility to rebalance portfolios in response to market conditions. Impact funds, by contrast, typically operate as closed-ended vehicles with 10-year or longer lifespans, modest cash distributions, and limited exit options that reflect the patience required for impact outcomes.

The challenge is greater still within the highly regulated world of pensions. Accessing pension capital has long been identified as the holy grail for impact, given the size of this market. Although the Global Impact Investing Network’s (GIIN) 2024 Market Sizing study shows pension fund impact capital allocation has grown to $455 billion, the figure is dwarfed by the total estimated $69.8 trillion available in global pension assets.

In Australia, mandatory retirement savings funds called superannuation funds are benchmarked against annual performance tests with underperformance carrying severe consequences. These benchmarks rely on traditional asset class indices that are poorly suited to impact investments. For example, impact-driven housing assets lack natural benchmarks and are often forced into inappropriate commercial categories.

Superannuation reform has been floated by many in Australia, with some advocating to allow for more impact investments as a way to boost productivity and enhance economic resilience. We have seen the United States’ restrictions on 401(k) retirement plans easing following President Trump’s August 2025 Executive Order expanding access to private equity. A similar move in Australia may enable increased commitments to illiquid impact investments, though safeguards must exist to ensure integrity. Current benchmarks are intentionally backward-looking, which can result in blind spots including how well portfolio investments are preparing for global megatrends such as climate transition risk or demographic shifts. The benchmark itself may require reform.

Conversely, the answer to opening regulation may lie in an adjacent guardrail on impact: Some major superannuation funds have successfully pioneered mandatory commitments to impact investments over recent years.

Emerging Solutions

Market dynamics appear to present a perfect storm working against impact: an inherent bias towards long-term illiquidity, regulatory discouragement, and struggles to exit within the broader market. Add in a tendency for impact managers to be smaller and less resourced than their mainstream counterparts, meaning that competing on fees is challenging, and the picture is bleak.

Yet beacons of light exist through new structures and strategies that ease liquidity constraints and retain impact integrity. The most significant, though also the most often misunderstood, is the rise of impact secondary funds.

Secondary funds

Secondary markets are essential to a functioning financial system, allowing investors to trade existing assets and reduce exposure to high-risk or unproven investments. In traditional private equity, secondary markets have grown substantially over the last 10 years with a record $152 billion reached in 2024.

By contrast, impact secondaries remain nascent, with less than 1 percent of impact capital focused on secondary strategies. Early pioneers such as Minneapolis’ North Sky Capital launched an impact secondary strategy more than a decade ago, while others—including Blue Earth’s 2026 dedicated impact secondaries fund—signal growing interest. Meanwhile, a recent report from British International Investment examined the potential for more such vehicles in emerging markets and developing countries.

The lack of secondary funds may simply reflect the relative youth of the impact market. Limited activity may also reflect the perception that secondaries are “less impactful,” offering reduced additionality compared to primary investments. However, a strong counterargument exists; secondaries can be a core engine for impact market growth.

Secondary funds enable capital recycling and increase the efficiency of primary markets by providing liquidity to early, risk-tolerant investors, allowing this “catalytic capital” to be recycled to seed and scale new impact opportunities—this is especially important given the scarcity of such capital.

Equally, secondary markets can attract more conservative, risk-averse investors by providing lower-risk, proven, and income-generating investments to a wider market. This creates market growth and provides another opportunity to mobilize significant pension fund capital for impact.

Listed vehicles and innovative structures

Publicly listed vehicles offer a clear liquidity solution by creating tradable secondary markets. Schroders BSC Social Impact Trust was an early example, aggregating private social impact assets that are illiquid in isolation into a listed structure. Similarly, the Women’s Livelihood Bond series, listed on the Singapore Stock Exchange, demonstrates how fixed-income instruments can provide access and liquidity. However, in both instances the challenge of scale remains, with the need for an equal or greater flow of inbound capital to service any withdrawals; trading activity remains low.

Continuation Vehicles (CVs) provide another avenue to liquidity by transferring assets from older funds into new vehicles allowing initial investors to exit. CVs have fuelled the growth in non-impact secondary markets with 20 percent of deals reaching the end of their term expected to pass through CVs, according to a McKinsey research report. LeapFrog Investments—a notable impact investing fund manager—has considered CVs for its 2013 fund which represents an early signal that impact managers may explore similar mechanisms as exit pathways remain constrained. CVs, however, attract heavy criticism from impact and non-impact orientated investors alike: Critics argue that CVs hide underperforming assets and delay inevitable write-downs by retaining underperforming assets and promote “zombie funds,” i.e., those that extend beyond their useful life yet continue to charge fees.

Other innovations seek to go further. Octobre—a consortium of mission-driven companies—has launched a “Liquidity Guarantee Facility” that provides a form of liquidity insurance by offering a contractual commitment to buy out investor stakes in exchange for an annual fee. While still experimental, such mechanisms point to new ways of addressing the liquidity challenge.

Public equities

Public markets are increasingly offering investment strategies that apply positive social and environmental criteria. While some investors are placing capital into these strategies, others remain skeptical about whether these investments will create meaningful, additional, impact.

Public equity fund managers often argue that they create impact through active management strategies, such as company engagement, voting on shareholder resolutions and supporting stronger impact practice. However, it can be difficult for investors to judge how effective these activities are.

This also creates an important trade-off. Actively managed funds generally charge higher management fees and have been shown to regularly underperform passive benchmarks, challenging the idea that investors do not need to sacrifice financial returns to pursue impact. Yet if public equities can create portfolio liquidity while delivering credible outcomes, impact investors may need to take a more pragmatic approach.

Recommendations

We believe that solving the crucial challenge of liquidity lies beyond having “the right product” alone. To be clear, there is absolutely a need for a significant impact secondaries market, with impact secondary funds offering the most promising answer. For this to happen, asset owners must step forward to anchor purpose-built secondary funds: The provision of cornerstone capital is critical to catalysing the interest of others by instilling confidence and reducing risk.

However, there is also a need to adopt a wider perspective in thinking about how we develop the overall impact investing market. It is becoming ever clearer that a key stumbling block to the deployment of catalytic capital to advance the frontiers of impact is the fact that this capital is frequently trapped in highly illiquid investments with no prospect of exit. The fostering of exit opportunities therefore needs to be more clearly recognized as a priority in the field of catalytic capital, and the establishment of a thriving secondary market seen as a valid market development outcome that should be pursued, rather than dismissed as less impactful.

Then there is the need to rethink traditional asset allocation. While established portfolio construction frameworks remain useful, the definition of “defensive” or “income” assets—a critical component of how to balance a portfolio’s risk profile—needs to be reimagined. Impact-aligned investments backed by real assets and long-term policy support are often dismissed due to perceived political risk. Yet renewable energy projects supported by long-term Power Purchase Agreements or social housing underpinned by rental subsidies can provide more stable income than many corporate bonds.

Paul Ramsay Foundation offers a practical example. Our Investment Policy Statement classifies “stabilized real estate” and “stabilized infrastructure” as defensive assets when they are fully invested, secured by tangible assets, and generate contracted income with regular distributions. This reframing expands the scope for impact within strategic asset allocation, even if it does not fully resolve liquidity challenges.

For impact investing to move from the margins to the mainstream, liquidity constraints must become a core design consideration for impact strategies rather than an afterthought. Progress requires a combination of new structures, new thinking, and a broader—yet rigorous—view of how impact is defined and created. The alternative is to continue treating impact as a small, illiquid corner of an otherwise conventional portfolio and accepting that most of our capital will ignore its social and environmental consequences. For a field built on the idea that capital can be a powerful force for good, that must be unacceptable.

I. The Purpose of Education

What is education for? In a moment when curricula are contested, and civic life is shot through with conflict, the question presses with urgency. Too often, the answers on offer are narrowly instrumental—education exists to prepare workers for the economy, or to transmit a fixed canon of knowledge, or to sort young people into tiers of credential and opportunity. Each of these framings captures something real, yet none is sufficient.

The conversation about education’s purpose should not be about whether education has a public purpose—of course it does—but whether it has a rationale beyond the economic. I argue that it does. Education supports human development, along all the axes of development involved in positive growth. Philosophers of education from Plato to the present have divided those axes of growth into the economic, the civic, and the existential or cultural. Human beings must grow into people who can materially sustain their livelihood—that is the economic dimension. They necessarily are part of a society and should play their role as citizens—the civic dimension. Lastly, human beings need proximate communities of meaning—the existential. This is reflected in the need for romantic love, cultural belonging, and spiritual nourishment.

The neoliberal era flattened our humanness by asking us to limit our attention to economic concerns. This is what so many are now trying to break free from. Artificial intelligence is reinforcing the urgency: It is not clear that we should continue to train people for economic tasks that machines can do, but we need to strengthen human judgment so that we fully govern the machines as they contribute to shaping our economic, civic, and cultural worlds. This requires recovering all three dimensions of human development.

The question before us is one of prioritization. If we have good reason to invest new energies in the civic and existential purposes of education, what are the implications for how we structure those investments? Must they pass through public schools? Or can a voucher-based system deliver the public goods we have in our sights? A powerful way to answer these questions is to begin by asking what is necessary for democracy education—for to start from the civic in education is to encompass the whole. Although the three aspects of human development are distinguishable, civic capacity itself depends on secure material foundations and strong connections to community. While one can forget about the civic when focusing on the economic or social, one cannot forget about the economic and social when focusing on the civic.

II. Three Challenges for Democracy Education

Democracy education is a central purpose of education because democracy is necessary to human flourishing. As I wrote in my book, Justice by Means of Democracy, human beings are purposeful creatures. We thrive when we are able to advance our own purposes, within the bounds of not dominating others’ ability to pursue their own purposes. Sustaining this freedom requires more than the protection of private rights. It requires the active exercise of public agency. Negative liberties—freedom from interference—cannot be maintained without positive liberties—the freedom to participate in shaping the rules under which one lives. W.E.B. DuBois made the point starkly when he argued for the necessity of the ballot: You do not get to keep your private freedoms unless you have a hand in the public decisions that structure them. If that is right, then education cannot concern itself only with private development. It must also equip people for the shared work of self-governance.

Educating for American democracy will mean grappling with three challenges. First, democratic life demands a form of multi-tasking that other political arrangements do not. Under a monarchy, oligarchy, or autocracy, most people need to attend only to their private affairs; political direction is someone else’s job. Democracy, by contrast, asks each of us to be simultaneously a private person—pursuing a livelihood, raising a family, cultivating friendships and interests—and a public agent, participating in the collective steering of the community. Plato thought this was a fatal flaw. He believed that human excellence required specialization: each person should do the one thing for which they are best suited and no more. A society of multi-taskers would be, in his vision, a garment embroidered with too many colors—busy, incoherent, mediocre.

The Athenians saw things differently. When Pericles delivered his celebrated funeral oration, he praised his fellow citizens precisely for their versatility—their ability to bring excellence to private industry and public judgment at the same time. The democratic wager is that people can, in fact, manage both dimensions of life, and that the effort of doing so is ennobling, not diminishing.

Education, in this view, must prepare people to navigate the dual demands of private and public life. This does not mean turning every classroom into a civics seminar. It means helping young people develop a sense of their own purposes—what they care about, what kind of life they want to build—and then helping them see that those private purposes are never fully separable from the public conditions that make them possible. The student who wants to become a nurse needs a healthcare system shaped by democratic decisions. The student who wants to start a business needs infrastructure, rule of law, and a marketplace structured by public policy. Education begins the work of making these connections visible, so that civic participation is recognized as an extension of daily life, not an imposition on it.

The second challenge is intellectual. Among all regime types, democracy places the greatest cognitive demands on its citizens. “Democracy” means the power of the people, but the people is an abstraction. To understand democratic governance, citizens must grasp how a dispersed, diverse population can act as a collective agent through institutions, procedures, and norms. They must understand what it means for power to be depersonalized—vested not in any individual but in offices, constitutions, and processes. This requires abstract thinking that must be taught.

Beyond this foundational conceptual work, democratic citizens face ongoing demands of judgment. They are asked to evaluate candidates, weigh policy proposals, serve on juries, and decide when and how to raise their voices. Citizens must be able to diagnose social problems, reason about which principles should guide collective responses, assess proposed courses of action, and evaluate the consequences of decisions already taken. They need frameworks for making sense of political life, and they need practice in the habits of mind that democratic judgment requires: the ability to hold complexity, to reason about tradeoffs, to distinguish reliable evidence from noise, and to attend to others, considering how the world looks from their perspectives. The classroom is where these habits of attention are formed—habits that support all the acts of judgment we want to preserve as a human responsibility and not cede to machines.

The third and most demanding challenge is relational. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his 1962 address “The Ethical Demands of Integration,” drew a crucial distinction between desegregation and integration. Desegregation removes legal barriers. Integration, by contrast, is positive and creative: it is the welcomed participation of all people in the full range of human activities. King insisted that real freedom—what he called “life-quality freedom”—requires the chance to fulfill one’s total capacity without artificial hindrance, and that chance depends on genuine inclusion in the processes through which a community shapes its shared life.

These relational demands are not peripheral to education; they are at its core. If democratic life requires that we hold the full spectrum of others’ humanity in our hearts, then education must cultivate the dispositions that make this possible. Students need opportunities to encounter perspectives radically different from their own, to practice disagreeing without demonizing, and to build bridging relationships—connections across lines of difference sturdy enough to sustain the friction of genuine political life. They need to learn that listening to strangers is not a concession but a requirement for effective citizenship.

III. The Authentic, Equitable Citizen

What kind of citizen, then, should education aim to cultivate? Not merely the informed voter, though information matters. Not merely the loyal partisan or the deliberative rationalist, though solidarity and reason both have their place. The model that emerges from these challenges is what we might call the authentic, equitable citizen. This is a person who begins from a clear sense of personal purpose—who understands what they care about, where their commitments come from, and how those commitments connect to the broader life of their community. Authenticity, here, is not self-absorption. It is the foundation from which meaningful civic engagement becomes possible, because only when we are clear about our own purposes can we honestly negotiate their relationship to the purposes of other people.

Equitability is the complement to authenticity. Equitable citizens do not merely pursue their own ends. They pursue them in a way that takes seriously the participation of others and that folds a concern for the ongoing health of the community into their understanding of their own good. Equitability emerges when citizens listen before they advocate, when they test their proposals against the well-being of those who will be affected, and when they commit to fair fighting—the practice of contesting rivals within agreed-upon rules, without seeking to obliterate opposition or rig the game.

Education oriented toward authenticity and equitability would look quite different from what most schools currently provide. It would give substantial attention to helping students explore their own purposes and values—not in the thin sense of career planning but in the deeper sense of understanding what kind of life feels worth living and why. It would treat civic knowledge not as facts to be memorized for a test but as living tools—knowledge about how political institutions work, how change happens, and how means must be connected to ends by ethical reasoning. It would prioritize relational skills: perspective-taking, civil disagreement, the capacity to collaborate across difference—habits of attention that no machine can replace. And it would be honest about the ethics of democratic life, teaching students that the pursuit of justice sometimes requires sacrifice, that burdens are not always equally distributed, and that the discipline of nonviolence is demanding precisely because it refuses the satisfactions of retaliation.

IV. Does Such Education Require Public Schools?

Ultimately, the purpose of education in a democracy is to prepare people to share power. This is at once a simpler and a more radical claim than it may first appear. Sharing power means more than voting. It means developing the capacity to deliberate with others toward consensus, to advocate passionately for one’s convictions within a framework of mutual respect, and even to engage in prophecy—the public speech and action that shifts a society’s values and reframes the terms of collective life.

An education worthy of democracy would not try to produce a single type of citizen. It would equip learners with a repertoire of civic capacities—deliberative, adversarial, prophetic—and then trust them to compose their own multi-tasking civic identity from that repertoire. Some will become activists; others will serve on local boards or run for office; others will exercise their citizenship primarily through the quality of attention they bring to their work, their neighborhoods, and their families. What matters is that each person has had the chance to develop the intellectual, relational, and ethical resources needed to participate meaningfully—and that they understand that the community’s health is inseparable from their own.

The test of such an education will not be found in test scores or graduation rates, though these have their place. It will be found in whether more people feel that democratic life belongs to them—that they have genuine standing, genuine voice, genuine power to shape the conditions under which they live. It will be found in whether we become better at calling each other in rather than calling each other out.

Does an education with these goals require public schools? It certainly requires public investment in schooling, as it has since the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 17th century, when the colonial assembly required towns to invest in education so that all children, not only those from families with means, could learn the laws. It also requires that the flow of public funds be tied to these democracy education goals. Must public funds also flow into publicly governed schools, or can we achieve our goals through a network of publicly funded but privately governed offerings?

The answer comes from the fact that learning how to share power in a democracy is about living with others even when we would prefer not to invite them into our gated community. This gives us a continued basis for maintaining publicly-governed schools that people participate in via geographical affiliation, a loose tie that provides an opportunity for communities to cultivate bridging social capital. Keeping the public purpose of education front and center—through publicly governed schools—is the path most likely to avoid the flattening out of education to its merely private purposes of the previous era.

As other articles in this series have discussed, compliance requirements are ramping up around the world and present a significant burden on philanthropic organizations of all kinds. These include restrictions and barriers related to the formation and registration of organizations, and the kinds of activities organizations can and cannot do. They also include barriers to accessing tax incentives or tax exemption; constraints on domestic funding and operations by cross-border foundations and nonprofits; increasing restrictions on unregistered or unincorporated domestic groups; often exceptionally onerous reporting requirements; impediments to fundraising and access to resources, both domestic and overseas; and direct repression of civil society, nonprofit, and philanthropic organizations, including the imprisonment of civil society leaders.

Although restraints like these are more severe in countries like China and Vietnam, they are not limited to authoritarian states. US government agencies, for example, are increasingly attempting to restrict, silence, and even close down nonprofits and philanthropic institutions through the use of executive orders, defunding of nonprofits, threats to advocacy groups and foundations, and greater compliance requirements.

Yet even in the midst of this bleak and darkening picture, there is some reason for hope. In a variety of countries in Asia and the Pacific, successful compliance with state laws and norms is enabling civil society organizations and funders to pursue reform and even oppose state policies that seek to repress civil society and its influence. Initiatives such as the Centre for Asian Philanthropy and Society and other efforts are helping organizations use compliance to carefully expand their scope of action, strengthen their operations, and, by professionalizing the compliance industry, increase the sector’s autonomy, even in highly controlling states.

Organizational Strength Through Compliance

First, organizations that comply with regulatory norms get something in return from the state; their legality gives them at least some space for action, even if their vision and goals don’t align. In India, for example, it’s hard for nonprofits to meet national and state-level compliance on issues related to governance and investment of funds, and enforcement of the country’s Foreign Contributions Regulation Act, which stipulates rules for the receipt of foreign funding, is both robust and frequently changing. Organizations that receive significant foreign funding sometimes live in fear of sanctions, deregistration, the withdrawal of tax benefits, closure, and the arrest of their leaders.

But compliant organizations in India are lawful organizations, and lawful organizations can advocate for their cause, operate more transparently, and even challenge the state to defend marginalized populations or their own interests. For example, when the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs stopped Greenpeace India’s access to overseas funds, Greenpeace India successfully sued the government. As the Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide noted, a prerequisite to the action was compliance: “Greenpeace India established that it was properly registered under the Foreign Contributions Regulation Act … and regularly filed necessary returns with the Ministry of Home Affairs.”

Second, many organizations are building internal capacity to meet compliance requirements in ways that make them stronger overall—often far stronger—than they were in the past. Throughout Asia, for example, ever-increasing compliance mandates are forcing organizations to develop accounting, audit, corporate, budget, employment, and tax skills and capacity to establish their legality and gain domestic funding, overseas funding, and contracts with government for service provision. In China, for example, organizations that achieve high regulatory and governance ratings from assessment bodies experience less harassment from the state, and have more opportunities to work directly with the government at national, provincial, and sub-provincial levels.

While contracting and collaborating with government to deliver services generally gives states greater control over nonprofit operations, it also allows nonprofits to win state funding and advance their own agendas. A recent Bridgespan study documents how foundations like the Tanoto Foundation in Indonesia and the Jollibee Group Foundation in the Philippines have used cooperation and contracts with government to further their own programmatic goals, such as services related to childhood stunting and school lunch programs, and advocate for policies and services that may sometimes go beyond state priorities. Compliance is a prerequisite for these activities.

Third, compliance strengthens the nonprofit sector’s agency and autonomy by professionalizing the compliance industry. Across Asia, nonprofit accountants and accounting firms, lawyers and law firms, tax specialists, and other professionals have come into their own in the past decade, contracting with civil society organizations and serving as a compliance bulwark against the state.

The ForNGO public interest law firm, for example, has helped Chinese charitable organizations and foundations meet compliance requirements since 2012. In India, compliance professionals have existed for much longer. For several decades, consultancies like the Centre for Advancement of Philanthropy and AccountAid, and other lawyers, accountants, and advisors have helped Indian nonprofits meet compliance mandates at the national and state levels, and often emerge stronger for the battle.

The Road Ahead

Compliance burdens on nonprofit and civil society organizations remain intense, even crushing, in areas of Asia and beyond. For many nonprofits and foundations, the question is how to maintain some level of autonomy and find ways to reform, criticize, or oppose state power when it impedes their work or threatens their right to operate.

In addition to the approaches above, organizations can strengthen processes that promote democracy and a culture of criticism within their own walls, as we have sometimes seen in China and elsewhere. They can also use their legalized status to build coalitions with others in civil society—including the media, legislators, even sympathetic government officials—often at the local level, as we see in the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia. And they can try to prevent their organizations from being overwhelmed by compliance—in part by becoming proficient in it, engaging specialized help, and, where possible, pushing for a reduction in requirements—to keep space for advocacy and the provision of services.

Indeed, without underestimating the burden of compliance systems, organizations that use them to legitimize and fortify their operations in these ways can withstand significant oversight and find ways to achieve what really matters—creating the social change and equity they seek.

In their article “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools,” Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka have done a service by calling us to reinvigorate the public purpose of American education. Their diagnosis that three decades of efficiency-first reform narrowed curricula and produced short-term score gains but failed to sustain long-term academic progress is important. We are now seeing a crisis of chronic absenteeism and declining youth mental health that cannot be ignored. Their recognition that we are living between paradigms, with the old framework no longer fitting our current reality and a new one struggling to emerge, is the right place to start.

But the way forward requires more than reinvigorating the public purpose of education. It requires renegotiating the social contract that underlies education—who holds power, who earns trust, who gets to make consequential decisions—and, in parallel, redesigning the system to fairly deliver on that new contract. Fairness here is not a downstream outcome of this renegotiation but a core design principle that must shape how power, resources, and opportunity are distributed from the start. These are distinct but related tasks, and conflating or trying to do only one of them at a time may be one reason reform has stalled. What we cannot afford right now is to continue mistaking schooling for learning and efficiency for fairness.

My organization, LearnerStudio, exists to build a fair, coherent, positive, future-ready learning system, focusing on human flourishing in the age of artificial intelligence. Over the past three years, we have supported emerging tools and models, listened to families and learners, and worked with education innovators building what we believe is the emergent third horizon of the system, designed not for industrial-era efficiency, nor for incremental improvements inside that old box, but to support all learners as individuals, in careers, and for democracy in this modern era. What follows is an attempt to identify the new social contract we need to define and to sketch the system design it requires.

The Old Social Contract Is Broken

The industrial era social contract for education rested on the premise that where you can afford to live drives what you get. “Experts” in the system were trusted to define what children need to learn. The system delivered standardized content and mandated compulsory seat time in schools. Sorting by test scores, zip codes, and credentials was accepted as a reasonable proxy for meritocracy and fairness. Parents of public school students, in this contract, were largely asked to hand their children to the state and wait.

This contract was negotiated implicitly over the late-19th and early-20th centuries, and though its terms weren’t always explicitly acknowledged, they were pretty clear. The state promised free universal schooling, a diploma useful to employers and colleges, and a shot at the middle class for any child who showed up and complied. Families promised deference in return: compulsory attendance, trust in professional expertise, and acceptance of standardization grounded in a system of course grades and multiple-choice tests. The system optimized for efficiency at scale, moving large numbers of children through a standardized process designed for an industrial economy that needed reliable, trainable workers. Over time, additions were layered on—for individuals with disabilities, or small alternative pathways, eventually charter public schools to increase educator and parent agency for a small percentage of families, “college for all” goals—but the core system stayed a standardized and efficiency-based system. Parents were largely peripheral. Individual flourishing, genuine mastery of knowledge or skills, and real equity were never seriously promised. Wealthy families had the agency and power to move their residency or pay for private school as ways to opt out.

The collapse of that old contract is accelerating under the weight of four forces that McGuire and Wilka acknowledge but do not fully reckon with.

The first is the COVID disruption. Pandemic school closures didn’t just interrupt learning, they broke trust and laid bare the system’s flaws. Parents watched, often powerlessly, as inflexible and irrational seat-time requirements had children passively receive compulsory content over Zoom. Many were radicalized by the experience. They saw the system’s rigidity and flatness up close, and they began demanding something different: more agency, more flexibility, more genuine attention to their child as an individual. That demand has not receded; it has accelerated.

The second is a generational transition and teen crisis of engagement and mental health. Disturbing signals are coming from young people that the system is not working for them: chronic absenteeism reaching 37 percent in some communities, rising rates of depression and anxiety, and deepening social disconnection. When nearly two-fifths of students are regularly absent, the problem is not individual motivation. It is a structural mismatch between a rigid, compulsory institution and what adolescents actually need to thrive.

The third force is artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is not merely a new tool for classrooms. It is an “arrival technology,” meaning technology that enters people’s lives before institutions choose or know how to adopt it, forcing systems to react rather than plan. Like smartphones, it is already in learners’ hands, regardless of whether schools are ready. The implications are critically meaningful for policy and design. When a technology arrives before adoption, the design question shifts from “how do we introduce this carefully?” to “how do we build our systems around and reckon with what is already here?” In real time, schools are choosing whether to engage with AI intentionally or to cede that decision entirely.

This shift is reshaping what counts as valuable knowledge, which skills define meaningful work and citizenship, and even what it means to be human. It commoditizes rote content recall at the same moment it demands higher-order capabilities: sustained attention, collaborative problem-solving, ethical reasoning, relational intelligence. The opportunity stakes of AI are as high as the equity stakes. Without intentional design, the families and communities best positioned to navigate new tools will move faster, while learners in under-resourced communities risk absorbing AI’s disruptions without access to its benefits.

It also poses quieter but equally serious threats: By removing relational friction, AI companions condition young people away from the productive struggle of real human relationships and dangerously substitute for the very human connection our society needs to heal growing divides. As one young person put it: “Young people are already developing emotional muscle memory with AI. We vent, ask for advice, process big emotions—and it almost always responds with validation, even when we prompt for nuance or challenge. So what are we practicing, if the only ‘person’ we talk to never disagrees? That’s why it’s so important for adults—whether that’s parents, educators, or mentors—to create space for safe, constructive disagreement. Because if we’re not building that muscle with humans, we risk raising a generation that avoids conflict entirely.”

The fourth force is the unbundling of the public education system through a fundamental shift in governance and funding. For decades, a shared federal-state architecture held together a collective commitment to universal public education, with public dollars flowing primarily to public institutions. That architecture is being redefined. The 2015 Every Student Succeeds Act decentralized authority to states, and 2025 marked a turning point as significant amounts of public funding began shifting away from public institutions and toward individuals through Education Savings Accounts (ESAs), voucher programs, and new federal tax credit mechanisms. More than 30 states now fund at least one private school choice program. This shift from a shared public system to a fragmented marketplace of state-by-state choices and privately administered accounts means that, as funding and participation disperse, the institutions intended to build civic identity and social trust are weakening, with no explicit effort to identify or support other ways to deliver on those goals. The Brookings Institution projects traditional public schools could lose another 8.5 million (~20 percent) students by 2050, raising serious doubt about whether the institutions we have historically counted on for delivering on our educational social contract will still exist at sufficient scale.

Together, these four forces don't call for reform of the old educational social contract. They require a new one.

What Families and Learners Are Asking For

Before defining a new social contract for education, we need to listen. Across dozens of conversations with families and learners, the LearnerStudio has heard four broad purposes.

The first is individual thriving, within a community. Parents want their children to reach their full potential; to be safe, healthy, and connected; and to have opportunities to develop both academic knowledge and personal passions. Before COVID, most described this in roughly Maslow-like terms: safety first, then academic quality, then enrichment. The pandemic disrupted that hierarchy. Remote learning exposed the emptiness of seat-time compliance and underscored the fact that belonging, mental health and motivation are not enrichment, they are essential. Families began naming resilience, connection, and purpose as core to their understanding of what it means to be a thriving learner.

The second is career preparation for a disrupted world. Education has always been a pathway to financial sustainability and meaningful work. For decades that meant “college readiness,” but cracks in that promise appeared long before the pandemic. Rising tuition and student debt raised questions about return on investment. AI’s disruption of traditional career ladders has accelerated the reckoning. What was once an “alternative pathway”—apprenticeships, trades, stackable credentials—is now increasingly understood as essential preparation for a workforce that AI is remaking in real time. At this point, even if we did accomplish what felt like an ambitious goal of “college for all” within the old efficiency framework, college is no longer a reliable proxy for career opportunity, dignity, or adulthood.

The third is values and character development. Families across the ideological spectrum want their children to develop a moral compass and a sense of identity and belonging. For some, this is framed in terms of justice and equity; for others, in terms of liberty and religious formation. But recent Beacon Project research suggests something that transcends this divide: Americans are hungry for what Beacon calls “morally directed agency”—agency for self-determination, yes, but also the felt ability to act together across differences toward a common good. Proficiency in math and ELA is important, but it cannot generate the trust, unity, and sense of shared purpose that society and democracy require.

The fourth is being a contributor to community. Most families, prior to this past year, rarely named “civics” or “democracy” explicitly. But most said something like: “I want my kid to be a productive contributor to society.” Increasingly, they are asking for real-world and life skills that include the ability to solve real problems.

These four purposes need not be in tension. They can be a unified vision of what it means to flourish—as an individual, in a career, and as a participant in community and democracy. The old social contract addressed, at best, fragments of this vision. The new one needs to address all of it.

Where the Current Conversation Falls Short

McGuire and Wilka offer important suggestions like field-building, timely research, civics competencies, and local dialogue about shared learning goals. These are solid uses of philanthropic capital. But there are four places where their frame limits the conversation.

The most important is their treatment of educational choice as primarily a market phenomenon and a neoliberal device that fragments the public system. This misses something fundamental. Choice is not just an instrumental mechanism; it is an expression of human agency, which is a basic condition of well-being. As Barry Schwartz argues in The Paradox of Choice, too little agency leads not merely to dissatisfaction but to learned helplessness. Families make educational choices for two reasons: instrumental (to achieve outcomes) and expressive (to express their values or identity). Both matter.

My own family’s experience illustrates the difference. We have accessed all four school types—district, charter, alternative, and private—as our daughters’ needs changed. For high school, one needed to prioritize belonging and diversity over academic pressure; we enrolled her in a local charter school not because of test score data but because she needed to be with kids who felt like “her people.” That was an expressive choice, and it enabled her to thrive in certain ways but not others. Our other daughter wanted rigorous academics and a strong commitment to community service, so she attended the local Catholic high school, though we are not Catholic. She made an expressive tradeoff to achieve an instrumental goal. Having the agency to make those choices increased our sense of responsibility to make them work. We also recognize that our family had access to resources—financial, informational, and relational—that made that navigation possible. Most families do not have that same access. The new social contract needs to enable choice and agency for all families and learners who want it.

When unions responded to charter schools not as a vehicle for expanding parent and learner agency within the public sector but as a competitive threat to be defeated, they may have inadvertently pushed families who wanted more agency toward ESAs, vouchers, and private alternatives. This is not primarily an ideological story. It is a systems story. The growth of vouchers and ESAs signals that families are looking for more responsiveness than the system was offering. A desire for agency doesn't disappear when suppressed; it adapts. When it adapts outside of public structures, it becomes harder to ensure that the common good is still being served. The lesson here is not that choice is dangerous. The lesson is that when systems don’t make room for the human need for agency, that need will eventually find itself being met elsewhere.

The second limitation is framing education as something that happens only in “school.” Learning happens everywhere—on YouTube, in community organizations, through apprenticeships, in faith communities. Recognizing, enabling, and crediting learning across these contexts is essential. As Pamela Cantor, Fernande Raine, and Susan Rivers argue in “The Science of Experiential Civics,” real-world civic engagement is far more powerful than classroom instruction about civics. While it’s possible that McGuire and Wilka would agree, their default frame of “school” as the only location of learning is unnecessarily limiting.

Third, their analysis doesn’t fully reckon with the power wealthy families have always had to exit the public system, avoiding any obligations intended to serve the public good. Any serious new social contract needs to address this and find ways to ensure that families attending private schools and/or using ESAs, vouchers, and private options are still contributing to, not just consuming, the common good. When public funds flow without civic obligations attached, we risk producing citizens who have never had to navigate difference, collaborate across disagreement, or invest in something beyond their own community, which is precisely what sustaining a pluralistic democracy requires. The consequence will likely be increased isolation and the slow erosion of the civic capacity democracy depends on.

Arthur Schlesinger described the recurring American pattern: periods of intense private focus followed by a turn to a generation that redirects its energy toward collective problem solving. We believe we have an opportunity to get beyond the idea that these pursuits are mutually exclusive. The choice between meeting the individual learner’s private good of agentic choices and personalized pathways, and serving the collective civic public good, is a false one. This tension is not inevitable; it is a design failure we now have the capacity to solve. We now have the technological capacity to accomplish both simultaneously. The question is whether we have the creative capacity to design for it, and the will to demand it.

A New Social Contract

The old social contract said more or less: attend an efficiently organized system of schools, accept standardized content and residential assignments, and the common good will follow from common requirements. The new social contract must rest on more humanizing terms, with more mutually reinforcing allocations of trust, power, and control. Below are some possible starting points.

The new contract says:

• Learners and families hold meaningful agency.
• Systems earn trust through responsiveness and results.
• Power is distributed, but bounded by fairness and public purpose.
• Learning builds both individual flourishing and civic thriving.

On trust: Rather than asking families to trust experts in schools to define and deliver what their children need, the new contract asks the system to trust parents and learners with more agency, and to earn trust in return by demonstrating that it can serve each learner’s actual needs—in and out of school. Trust flows from authentic relationships, deeper connections, and demonstrated responsiveness, not merely from credentialed authority. One example of this kind of increased trust is a new project by the Georgia Department of Education responding to increased student departures by partnering with the Institute for Self Directed Learning to support school districts in connecting with their communities, understanding parent and learner needs, and building new learner-centered education models to provide both deeper learning for students and to inspire a return to public schools among families who left for other learning environments.

On power: Rather than concentrating decision-making authority in institutions, the new contract distributes more power to learners and families. But distributing power without deliberately designing for equal access to information, resources, and support does not produce fairness; it reproduces the same gaps in a new form. The new contract must be explicit. Expanded agency is only meaningful if it is genuinely within reach for every family, not just those who already know how to find it. Without that commitment, we risk building a more flexible system that still sorts children by circumstance, just in new ways. This requires designing for fairness upfront, ensuring that those historically furthest from opportunity have greater access to resources, support, and high-quality options, not just equal access in theory. This is the distinction between what we might call a “mirage of standardization”—declaring common standards as a tool for achieving equity while failing to achieve them for many learners, producing what could be called “destructive variability” that correlates with income and race—versus achieving genuine “productive variability,” where diverse pathways lead to flourishing in many different ways for different learners.

On control: Rather than the system owning the evidence of learning, learners will need to access and leverage their own data so they can chart adaptable paths. Learning and Employment Records (LERs), portable, mastery-based records of what a learner knows and can do, replace rigid institutional transcripts as the currency of the new system. This data sovereignty is not just a technical reform; it is a statement about whose life this is, and it needs to be durable across previous silos of age and schooling in order to create a tech-enabled backbone for lifelong learning. Innovation and multiple pathways are also going to require reframed measurement and accountability as we create new tools and infrastructure to support capturing mastery of a broader set of outcomes we want to achieve. The risk to guard against is allowing this reorientation toward broader outcomes to reduce rigorous, honest measurement of whether mastery is actually being achieved.

A new social contract is not only a set of promises from the system to families. It is also a set of obligations that flow the other way. Families who access public funds carry a responsibility to contribute to the common good, not just consume from it. Institutions must earn trust, and those who have always had the means to opt out must now have reason to invest. A contract that only asks things of those with the least is not a new social contract. It is the old one with new language.

As McGuire and Wilka remind us, education sits within, and is affected by, a larger political ecosystem. As we consider how to craft this new social contract for education in the age of AI, we see two worldviews competing to define the future more broadly. The first, which we at LearnerStudio call techno-nihilism, pretends there is a values-neutral default to technology. There is not. Techno-nihilists center efficiency above all else and assume that anything AI can do faster than humans, it should do. The second, which we call nostalgic humanism, responds to technology’s acceleration by calling for a return to a pre-digital world. Both are inadequate. What we need is a new social contract to articulate a middle way, focused on flourishing. This means using technology purposefully, where it genuinely serves human development; protecting and cultivating the distinctly human capacities that AI cannot replace; and centering values like the dignity of human work, human connection, and human agency as non-negotiable core values.

System Design for the New Social Contract

The moment requires not only a new social contract but also a new system architecture. As we have shared previously, a three horizons heuristic helps clarify the design challenge. The first horizon is the old industrial system—still dominant, visibly in decline. The second horizon is reform work that tries to improve the old system but remains constrained by its efficiency rules and infrastructure. The third horizon is the system we need to create, emerging at a small scale in communities across the country, ready to be recognized, resourced, and scaled.

The new system needs to center three pillars: human agency, with young people as active drivers of their learning and humans as drivers of AI, not passive recipients; human connection, where learning is fundamentally relational, with technology enabling and amplifying rather than replacing human bonds; and human sustainability that equips learners with modernized content knowledge and skills, including AI fluency, cross-disciplinary problem-solving, leadership, entrepreneurship, and the morally directed agency they need to thrive and contribute.

These pillars need to connect with four concrete system design commitments.

Flexible and fair funding. We will need weighted student-based funding that accounts for poverty, disability, and other factors affecting learning, and follows the learner rather than the zip code. This untethers opportunity from residential geography. This might also include ways to provide more innovation flexibility like re-invigorating charter public schools by defining new “innovation charter schools” with significantly more freedom from traditional accountability rules, as well as similarly flexible district innovation schools and microschools as ways to strengthen public options that offer agentic learning.

Agency, flexibility, and sovereignty. Learners and families need the power to construct learning pathways that meet their needs—sometimes at the school level, often at the level of individual learning experiences. This means cultivating not only self-directed agency but also “morally directed agency”: the capacity and desire to contribute to something beyond oneself. And it means learners owning their data through LERs—portable evidence of mastery that empowers navigation of both the learning system and the labor market.

A spectrum of civic service. The concept of “civic thriving” advanced by Fernande Raine and colleagues at the History Co:Lab is core infrastructure for a functioning democracy in the age of AI. We believe this needs to be addressed in a developmental arc. It begins with elementary civic knowledge and service-learning, deepens through community-based problem-solving—middle school models like RevX and The Forest School are already demonstrating what this looks like—and we propose it should culminate in universal national service (civilian or military) for every young person between 18 and 24. This “civic utility” would build national cohesion across lines of geography, race, class, and ideology, and also addresses a practical problem. As AI has disrupted the entry-level career ladder, national service is one of the most powerful ways to rebuild it while simultaneously developing the civic skills democracy requires.

Supply-side stewardship. The state’s role shifts from managing a standardized system to stewarding a robust, diverse ecosystem of high-quality options: schools, community learning hubs, microschools, lab schools, and stackable learning experiences as varied as the learners they serve, all held to broad standards of quality and access, redefined for flourishing in the age of artificial intelligence.

The Design Challenge

The destination we are designing toward is this: Every young person, regardless of zip code, is inspired and prepared to launch into adulthood with agency, purpose, a pathway to a fulfilling and sustaining career, and the desire and capacity to engage in our diverse democracy, not as a passive subject, but as an active co-creator.

This is a true design challenge, not a policy tweak. It requires what Thomas Kuhn would call a paradigm shift, not refinements to the old framework but the construction of a new one. The old “grammar of schooling,” a learner sitting passively in an age-sorted classroom, in a building called “school,” progressing by seat time toward a standardized credential, needs to give way to a new “grammar of learning”: centering human agency, human connection, human sustainability, and providing mastery-based, personalized, relationally rich, credentialed learning in and beyond traditional school walls.

If we succeed, private gain and public good reinforce each other. Young people who experience genuine agency develop the confidence to exercise it in civic life, unleashing innovation that could fuel our economy, freeing learners from a check-the-box, do-as-you’re-told mindset to innovate in ways that could create jobs, lift more people out of poverty, and improve our overall quality of life. Citizens who practice collaborative problem-solving build the relational muscle to sustain pluralistic democracy. Individual flourishing and collective thriving are not competing ends, they are the same destination approached from different directions.

If we fail, we will continue the cycle of overcorrection: swinging from standardization in the hopes of equity to privatization in the name of individual freedom, without ever building an integrated vision that can sustain both liberty and justice for all. The age of AI does not have to be an age of human displacement and disconnection. But if we hold to the old social contract, that is the path we are on.

A new social contract is possible. The need is clear. The models, tools, and policy ideas are emerging. What’s needed now is the clarity to set a vision, the courage to build and scale, and the investment to ensure it fairly reaches every learner, not just those whose parents have the means to find it on their own.

Most students will spend more time at work than in any other activity after graduation. If we want public education to prepare students for human thriving—the vision Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka propose in “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools”—we must prepare them to make meaningful contributions through their work and to pursue careers that leverage—and continue to advance—their full potential.

McGuire and Wilka rightly challenge a system that presently defines success through narrow, self-referential metrics: test scores, grades, graduation rates. They ask us to consider goals more longitudinally, across a lifetime. That longitudinal view necessarily includes career success—and this shouldn’t be controversial. Four in five high school students say the main reasons to go to college are to get a good job and make more money. For students and their families, thriving isn’t abstract.

Yet today, schools struggle to deliver on this promise. Although K-12 systems still define success by college enrollment, data suggests only 23 percent of high school graduates will finish college and get a job requiring their degree. We spend billions annually on high school career and technical education (CTE) training through the Perkins Act, yet only 18 percent of the CTE credentials students earn are actually in demand. The result: Over 7,000 CTE students per year earn Beef Quality Assurance certification, at best preparing them for low-wage, dangerous jobs in meat packing with little prospect for advancement. Meanwhile, credentials that unlock good jobs go undersupplied.

These failures compound over time. More than half of Americans are stuck, working below their potential: 37 million in low-wage work, 31 million college graduates in jobs that don’t require a degree, 17 million who earned degrees but hit a career wall, and 13 million who couldn’t regain their footing after employment gaps—often women who took time away to care for family. This isn’t just individual disappointment. It undermines the American promise of upward mobility and erodes the economic competitiveness on which our shared prosperity depends.

New Imperatives for What Students Must Learn

Ensuring that students succeed means rethinking what we teach them—and how deeply we teach it. Three imperatives stand out: (1) doubling down on liberal arts fundamentals, (2) expanding the definition of foundational skills, and (3) raising the bar on proficiency. Together, these redefine what it means to be prepared for work and for citizenship in a changing economy.

Doubling down on liberal arts fundamentals. It has become popular sport to ridicule the worth of the liberal arts. Yet claims that liberal arts have no economic value are belied by employers themselves. Skills like communication and collaboration rank among those most sought in job postings and prove the most durable over the course of a career. These are meta-skills—the skills to acquire new skills, assuring human agility in a dynamic economy, especially amidst the portent of artificial intelligence disruption. Burning Glass Institute analysis indicates that core liberal arts capabilities comprise an increasing share of work activity as people advance into positions of greater responsibility.

These are not only the skills of employability; they are the skills of democratic life. The liberal arts cultivate judgment, dialogue, interpretation, and shared problem-solving: capacities essential both for functioning workplaces and for functioning republics. Reorienting education toward careers and toward democracy is not a trade-off. It is the same project.

Expanding what counts as foundational skills. When Burning Glass and American Student Assistance studied skills that span high-value work across domains, we found a portfolio wider than just the three Rs. It increasingly includes digital and data skills, and the business skills to apply them to real-world problems. For example, project management and data analysis are essential in careers from finance to nursing and propel people up the ladder. Yet in our survey of middle- and high-school teachers, many failed to recognize this broader portfolio: While 81 percent saw communications skills as essential, less than half said the same of data analysis. Worse, teachers themselves don’t believe we teach these skills well today; teachers in high-poverty classrooms are significantly more likely to rate them as important yet significantly less likely to believe that their schools teach them effectively.

Raising the bar on proficiency. Today, many students fail even basic benchmarks, with continued declines in achievement. Twelfth- graders score at a 33-year low in reading and a 20-year low in math. A third lack basic reading skills. The arrival of AI creates a new urgency. As AI automates tasks formerly done by entry-level college graduates, students must graduate with capabilities they would normally develop after several years in the workforce. Our research shows that in fields offering strong prospects for upward mobility, early rungs of the career ladder, where young people learn their trade, are being automated. As AI raises the bar on proficiency, students will need to be able to start their careers in the middle, rather than at the beginning—starting day one of their first job at a skill level previously expected after several years in the workforce.

Rethinking Curriculum and Instruction for the Age of AI

These three imperatives define what students must learn. But a second question follows: How must curriculum itself evolve when the nature of work is changing so rapidly? The rise of artificial intelligence does not replace these priorities. It intensifies and reshapes them. To prepare students for thriving careers, we must now reconsider not only which skills matter, but how technological change reorganizes the value of those skills across disciplines.

Today’s public school curriculum is largely an artifact of the Cold War space race, prioritizing subjects like trigonometry, physics, and foreign language—plus the organizational skills to support widescale industrial mobilization. We now face a new technological transformation, but discussions among educators often focus narrowly on AI’s classroom role as an instructional tool. That misses the point. AI doesn’t just change how we teach; it changes what students need to know. By reshaping how we work, AI elevates some capabilities while reducing the importance of others.

Our analysis across 20 state curricula reveals that the curricular implications are nuanced. AI impacts skills in every subject, yet none of the 140 learning objectives we studied will disappear—many will simply need rethinking. Take, for example, research readiness: Source validity assessment and evidence evaluation become more critical, while report writing and research planning may require less emphasis. These shifts aren’t marginal. They reshape what we consider to be foundational to modern education and work.

This pattern reflects a deeper dynamic. The interplay of AI automation and augmentation creates a new set of power skills for the 21st century. AI makes certain capabilities like writing and data analysis simultaneously more efficient and more effective, transforming them into force multipliers in the workplace. But they require a different pedagogy. Similarly, contrary to widely held belief, skills like coding and design aren’t eliminated by AI but, rather, democratized through it. This puts competency in these skills within reach for far more people, while they also become essential to far more careers. Computational thinking—the ability to incorporate coding into one’s work—becomes a capability many more professionals will need.

A New Architecture for Schooling

Preparing students to thrive in their careers also challenges us to rearchitect the structure and format of schooling itself to make career planning and preparation more central. This includes:

Career guidance grounded in labor market reality. Every student needs visibility into post-completion opportunities and better tools for decision-making—including considering options that don’t involve college. Yet we force students into a false binary: “academic” education versus “career” education, asking them to choose with remarkably little guidance about long-term implications. All students need both. While employers unquestionably value foundational skills, they also badly need workers who show up job-ready. Many careers offering the highest rates of economic mobility require that students build applied skills beforehand.

Some starting jobs are “launchpads”—they increase by fourfold the chances that graduates will become top earners by age 40. By focusing exclusively on channeling students to college, our current guidance system misses opportunities to prepare students for these jobs—let alone to help them distinguish these launchpads from dead ends.

Meaningful work-based learning for every student. Experimentation is natural to human development, yet students get little opportunity for iterative refinement of career goals and preferences, leaving them to make major decisions in the abstract. Work-based learning lets students try on different careers before committing. In our current high-stakes system, by the time a student realizes a career is wrong for them, it’s often too late.

In our research on post-secondary career success, internships play a singularly important role: A single internship halves the risk of underemployment. A forthcoming Burning Glass Institute study shows that internship participation rates are the biggest factor distinguishing colleges whose graduates outperform their peers in long-term career outcomes. What would it take to ensure that every student gets at least one meaningful work-based learning experience?

But the value of work-based learning is evident across the full educational lifecycle, writ large, even if it is structured differently at each stage to reflect developmentally appropriate forms of engagement with real work. In secondary school, work-based learning is primarily about exploration and informed choice, such as short-term job shadowing, employer-connected projects, or part-time industry experiences that help students understand career pathways before committing to them. In post-secondary education, the emphasis shifts to launch. Internships, clinical placements, and apprenticeships provide sustained, skill-building experience that enables students to translate academic preparation into career entry with momentum.

The value of work-based learning persists into the workplace itself. In fact, the underpinning of career advancement is skill acquisition. In that context, work-based learning represents a key mechanism for mobility. Worker training, employer-supported reskilling, and learn-while-you-work transition programs allow people to adapt to technological change or move into new roles without stepping away from employment.

Seen this way, meaningful work-based learning is not a single intervention but a structured progression—exploration, launch, and mobility—supporting career development across the lifespan.

From launching careers to sustaining them. Such changes could improve markedly how effectively students launch into careers—a good start. However, on average, Americans make 12 transitions over the course of their professional lives. Each is an opportunity to move up or get stuck. Ensuring that public schools cultivate skills to navigate those transitions would be significant progress. But the greatest transformation required for thriving careers is restructuring our education system to enable learning beyond our first two decades, to reconceive public education as a resource available across the arc of a career. This is hardly a fanciful idea. In an era of declining fertility, lengthening lifespans, and the ongoing technological reinvention of work, a growing number of educators and social scientists argue that human capital must be developed across the life course, not concentrated in the first two decades.

That would be a major departure from the system we have today, which offers few viable paths for returning to school and building new skills over time. Traditional universities are organized around degrees that take too long to earn for on-demand learning. Community colleges would be a natural infrastructure, but the significant majority of funding and programming focuses on transfer degrees—at least in theory, preparing young adults for four-year universities—rather than the workforce training these institutions that is most needed. Our workforce system itself is too underfunded to be viable. Despite a graduate glut, the US government spends 54 times more on funding college degrees through the federal Pell grant program alone than it does on training through the Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act, the primary source of funding to our workforce system.

Some might mistake this as a call to refashion public schooling as vocational preparation. Educators often bristle at the suggestion that they bear responsibility for ensuring that students make a good start, arguing that education prepares students for the twentieth job, not the first. But our research shows that the first job often determines access to the twentieth. More than half of all graduates start in jobs that don’t require their degree; 44 percent remain underemployed a decade later.

Toward a New Vision of Education for Thriving Lives

Teaching applied skills and investing time in career exploration isn’t just about tactical training. Through these activities, students develop a set of capabilities for navigating transitions: learning to seek out opportunity, evaluate decisions, identify and acquire the skills needed to enable new directions, and to experiment and iterate over time. These are meta-skills for lifelong growth.

In the bestselling 2017 book Janesville: An American Story, Amy Goldstein describes workers upended by the closing of a GM plant in Wisconsin flooding the local community college and training programs. They knew they needed to reskill, but their learning skills were decades out of date, and they had little guidance on how to make reskilling choices. For many, the attempt became an expensive lesson in frustration. With the coming wave of AI-driven disruption, we cannot afford failed attempts at second chances.

Ultimately, the combination of more rigorous education in core foundations, greater opportunity to build applied skills, and new focus on career awareness and experimentation represents a framework for enduring purpose, versatility, and growth. It also represents a basis for cultivating civic agency. Learning to navigate institutions, collaborate across differences, and make informed decisions about one’s future are not only career competencies but also the foundations of democratic participation.

What emerges is not a shift away from education’s traditional purposes but a deeper fulfillment of them. Preparing students for work, for citizenship, and for lifelong growth are not competing aims but rather mutually reinforcing. The same meta-skills that enable people to adapt across careers enable them to deliberate, participate, and lead in civic life. The same liberal arts capacities that sustain democratic culture also power innovation in the economy. And the same commitment to learning across a lifetime that supports career mobility sustains human flourishing more broadly. The central task then is to move beyond false choices: between liberal arts and technical training, between career readiness and civic formation, between economic productivity and human development. The future demands their integration.

Discourse about aligning education with the future of work often centers on “how” questions. It’s time we addressed the “what” questions. What capabilities do students need to thrive in this century versus the last? What investments raise the bar for everyone, enabling students to outperform AI? What skills enable students to acquire new skills throughout their working lives? What structures can extend public education’s promise to support a lifetime of growth and of thriving? Without a new vision, we will continue producing students primed not to succeed in their working lives, but to be replaced.

Public education in the United States was envisioned as a great equalizer: a way for every child, regardless of circumstance, to have a fair chance at a fulfilling life. In practice, however, that vision was never fully realized or universally extended. Horace Mann's 19th-century advocacy for universal schooling, and later John Dewey’s link between education and democracy, carried ideals that were aspirational then and remain unfinished now.

In "A Democratic Vision for Public Schools," Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka argue that recent decades of reform narrowed our understanding of what schools are for, tilting toward what can be measured and managed, and away from the civic and human purposes that make public education a public good. Their invitation, one I share, is to step back from today’s tactical debates and ask a more foundational question: What is the purpose of public education, now, in a diverse democracy under strain?

While public education has become more inclusive over time, inequities in opportunity, achievement, and outcomes have persisted. The world has changed, technologically, economically, and politically, and yet schools have stayed remarkably static. Families are leaving those traditional structures at an astonishing rate in favor of public charter, private, homeschool, microschool, and even less formal options.

At the same time, young people are increasingly skeptical of the "school deal": The promise that years of hard work in school will translate into a stable, secure life. For many—especially those furthest from opportunity—rising college costs, economic precarity, and rapid technological disruption cast doubt on whether traditional pathways still lead where they once did.

In this moment of eroding trust, we cannot afford to treat education as an incremental project. The question before us is not just how we improve schools, but why we have them—what purposes they can and must serve.

If we are serious about fulfilling education’s democratic purpose, we must be willing to build and try radically different models: where young people help shape what and how they learn, connect their studies to the real world, and develop the skills to thrive in a rapidly changing society.

Revisiting the Purpose of Education

Public education has always reflected both America’s aspirations and its contradictions. It has opened doors for millions, yet it has also mirrored and reinforced the inequities of the broader society.

Too often, we’ve talked about education as something you pursue for yourself—to get ahead, to earn more, to climb higher, and to secure your own success. That framing has shaped everything from policy decisions to dinner-table conversations. But when education is treated as a private transaction rather than a shared public good, it becomes harder for people to see why everyone should support and sustain it.

McGuire and Wilka describe how a market-oriented era of reform helped shift schooling toward individual returns: choice, competition, and outcomes defined by standardized measures. Whether one agrees with every aspect of their diagnosis, I think they are right about the consequence: When purpose narrows, so does imagination. And when imagination narrows, schools become easier to dismiss, defund, or dismantle because fewer people can articulate what, beyond individual advancement, they are for.

Reclaiming the purpose of education begins with understanding that thriving individuals and thriving communities depend on one another. Education is how we prepare young people to lead meaningful lives while strengthening the communities and democracy they inherit.

These aims reinforce one another. When students learn to think critically, to collaborate across lines of difference, and to contribute to something larger than themselves, they not only shape stronger futures for themselves; they strengthen the civic fabric that binds us together. Education at its best helps young people learn how to work with others, debate and discuss ideas, and build trust-based relationships that nurture belonging and heal divides.

For that reason, the next chapter of education cannot narrowly focus on raising test scores or recovering learning loss, important as those goals are. It should focus instead on building the capacities that sustain a healthy democracy: discernment, collaboration, ethical reasoning, empathy, and the courage to shape solutions for problems we cannot yet see. It should also be guided by a collective vision for what education makes possible—one that inspires young people to see themselves not only as learners but as builders of a future that is more just and more connected than the society we have today.

From Incremental Change to New Models

For decades, reform efforts have sought to improve public education by tweaking what exists. We’ve revised standards, reshaped accountability systems, introduced new curricula, and layered in new technologies. Yet we’ve rarely stopped to question the design of the system itself.

Incremental change has improved outcomes for some, but it has not altered the broader trajectory, and our K–12 system remains far from where it needs to be. Preparing young people for the demands of today’s world will require something bolder: school models that are fundamentally different, not just marginally better.

At NewSchools Venture Fund, our role is not to scale a single model, but to invest early in leaders and designs that challenge the traditional boundaries of schooling. For example, with early funding from NewSchools, BELIEVE Academy, a charter school in St. Louis, opened in 2024 with a clear mission: integrate academic rigor with hands-on healthcare pathways from day one of high school. Students work in simulation labs alongside healthcare professionals and earn industry-recognized certifications while completing college-credit coursework. Through partnerships with BJC HealthCare and St. Louis Community College, students graduate prepared to enter high-demand medical careers or pursue higher education with significant credits already earned.

Similarly, at Discovery Polytech Early College High School, a public district school in Springfield, Massachusetts, learning is organized around interdisciplinary, project-based experiences connected to real-world problems. Students collaborate on long-term projects, present their work publicly, and build portfolios that demonstrate mastery over time. Assessment extends beyond traditional tests to include exhibitions, performance tasks, and community engagement. The result is a school model that rethinks time, evaluation, and the role of teachers to better prepare students for both college and civic life.

These schools are not incremental adjustments to the factory model. They are structural redesigns—rethinking schedules, partnerships, assessment, and the role of community—to ensure that learning is connected to contribution and long-term possibility. In doing so, young people aren’t just gaining skills; they’re expanding their sense of possibility and developing a deep sense of purpose that will carry them through their lives.

When students discover that their learning holds both personal meaning and public value, the impact compounds outward. Communities gain new ideas, leadership, and creativity. Local economies grow more resilient as young people see viable futures where they live. And civic life becomes stronger as graduates bring curiosity, empathy, and critical thinking into how they engage with others.

In these new models, school becomes a place where learning feels alive because it is lived—and success is defined by how students use their knowledge to improve their lives and the world around them.

The Human Core of Learning

As technology continues to reshape how we live, work, and learn, the most essential skills are the ones that make us human. Critical thinking, ethical reasoning, creativity, empathy, and discernment have always mattered, but in an age of artificial intelligence, they’ve become indispensable.

The next generation of learning must help young people understand not only how to use AI and emerging technologies, but how to think about them: conceptually, tactically, and ethically. Every profession will soon—if not already—require some fluency in AI. More importantly, every person will need the judgment to decide when and how these tools should be used.

Across the country, AI solutions are springing up, promising to transform how students learn and how teachers teach. The potential is extraordinary, but so are the risks. Used thoughtfully, AI can deepen personalization, free teachers’ time for connection, and expand opportunity. Used carelessly, it can magnify bias, spread misinformation, and narrow learning to what can be easily measured. Some of the most promising efforts illustrate what it looks like to use AI in service of deeper learning rather than efficiency alone.

Coursemojo, for example, is an AI-powered teaching assistant designed to improve reading and writing in grades 3-10. Founded by two former teachers and middle school principals, Dacia Toll and Eric Westendorf, Coursemojo was built to help teachers address one of the most persistent challenges in classrooms: supporting students at very different levels at the same time. Mojo supports teachers by turning existing curriculum and assignments into interactive, conversational experiences. When they need it, students receive scaffolded support, feedback, and follow-up questions without being given the answers, while teachers gain real-time insight into how students are thinking. In a quasi-experimental study of more than 2,200 sixth graders, students using Coursemojo significantly outperformed their peers on state ELA assessments with an eight-point advantage. The gains were especially strong for students furthest from opportunity, reducing achievement gaps for students with disabilities by two-thirds and for economically disadvantaged students by half.

Other human-first AI models are showing similar promise. PeerTeach, for example, uses AI to strengthen peer learning and student-to-student relationships, rather than to increase isolated screen time. The platform supports student pairing and adapts practice problems, but the learning happens through conversation: Students explain their reasoning, ask questions, and coach one another through challenges. In a mixed-methods study, middle school students demonstrated statistically significant growth, with mean proficiency increasing from 38 percent to 65 percent. Here, AI is designed to facilitate human interaction and accelerate learning—not substitute for it.

There is vast potential in AI to personalize practice, surface insights, and extend access to learning in powerful ways. But not every problem can—or should—be solved by a machine. Human judgment and moral reasoning will remain essential skills for both the workplace and democratic life.

In their essay, McGuire and Wilka describe how recent decades of reform narrowed schooling toward what could be easily measured and managed. The risk with AI is that it will reinforce this pattern. If we treat school as a set of measurable outputs, AI will be deployed to optimize for those outputs, such as test scores, whether or not they reflect what students actually need to learn or who they need to become. But if we start from a broader purpose—human thriving in community—AI can be used in service of that aim, supporting deeper learning rather than replacing it.

The most promising new school models show what this looks like in practice. They use technology to expand learning in tangible ways by providing timely feedback, opening access to real-world problems and resources, and personalizing pathways. At the same time, they’re anchoring school in human connection, belonging, and shared purpose. In these environments, students learn that AI is not a substitute for judgment, and that the skills needed to use it responsibly are the same skills needed for life.

In this sense, the work of reinventing school is inseparable from the work of renewing democracy. The question before us is not only how we prepare students for a world shaped by technology but how we prepare them to shape that world themselves.

Redefining the Role of Teachers

As we design and scale new models of learning, we also need to reexamine the core role of the teacher. If we want students to experience something radically different, we have to create systems that allow adults to work differently, too.

In these new models, teaching becomes a shared endeavor, extending beyond the walls of a classroom and inviting a broader circle of people to support young people’s growth.

Community leaders, industry experts, and caregivers all have a role to play in helping students connect learning to life. When a local engineer mentors students on renewable energy projects, or a grandparent volunteers to record oral histories for a social studies unit, students gain not only skills but relationships, perspective, and purpose.

At the same time, we need to redesign the role of professional educators to make this broader vision possible. Today, teachers are expected to guide students through complex, interdisciplinary challenges; to help them use technology and AI ethically and creatively; and to cultivate curiosity, compassion, and critical thinking. But the systems around them haven’t evolved to match those expectations. Too many educators are overburdened and under-supported, with little time to collaborate or reflect. Even the tools meant to help them often add to their workload instead of freeing time for connection and innovation. Great teaching requires protected time to co-plan, examine student work and data, and iterate. Schools need the operational backbone to free up that time.

Some emerging models are showing what it looks like to redesign around that reality. Serving newcomer students nationwide, the Internationals Network organizes teams of five to six teachers around a shared cohort of 75–100 multilingual learners. These teams meet regularly—often daily—to coordinate language development across subjects, align instruction, and personalize support. This structure fundamentally changes how teaching happens. Instead of working in isolation, teachers work as a team, bringing different expertise to support the same group of students and ensuring each student is known across contexts. The result is a more coherent and connected experience for students.

CommunityShare shows how technology can expand and reimagine the role of the teacher. In many schools, the responsibility for connecting learning to the real world falls almost entirely on classroom teachers. CommunityShare’s digital platform, professional learning, and coaching are designed to change that. Through their “digital human library” teachers are matched with scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, and other local professionals who co-create real-world learning experiences with students. Across 18 communities, CommunityShare has reached more than 2,100 educators and 89,000 students, with teachers reporting stronger engagement, deeper critical thinking, and clearer connections between school and future opportunities. Notably, 90 percent of surveyed educators say the experience increased their desire to remain in the profession.

Together, these models and their early results signal the potential for a different vision of how technology can support teaching, one that expands what teachers can do and creates the conditions for higher-impact work.

When we broaden who counts as an educator and position teachers as facilitators of learning rather than deliverers of information, we build stronger schools and stronger communities. Students gain access to real-world expertise, and teachers can focus on guiding thinking, building relationships, and supporting deeper understanding. In these environments, adults and young people learn alongside one another, modeling the shared responsibility that a thriving democracy requires.

A Marshall Plan for Education

For more than 20 years, education leaders have called to “reinvent the factory model of schooling.” That call remains right, but it’s also incomplete. The deeper challenge before us is about purpose and imagination.

McGuire and Wilka argue that we are in a paradigm transition, a period of instability when old assumptions are breaking down and new ones have yet to take hold. In moments like this, institutions either retrench or reinvent themselves. Public education cannot afford the former.

We have the opportunity, and the obligation, to build schools that earn public trust by fulfilling a purpose people can recognize, value, and believe in. Education must create the conditions for every child to thrive, knowing that the strength of our democracy is built on their success.

What would it look like to treat this moment with the urgency of a Marshall Plan for education? If we made a national commitment to prepare young people for a world that’s changing by the day? It will take a shared commitment to a direction and set of principles that will ensure we can serve young people far better than we have before.

In this future:

• Each young person develops the knowledge, skills, agency, compassion, and moral judgment to chart their own path, sustain well-being, and contribute to shared prosperity.
• Learning experiences are rooted in real-world purpose, helping young people see who they are and how they matter.
• Communities work together with schools and other learning settings to cultivate belonging, agency, and trust—seeing every young person as a future maker and a whole person, not just a student.
• Education serves democracy, nurturing the capacity to work across differences, discern truth, and act for collective flourishing.

In this way, education can fulfill its purpose by investing in individuals and equipping them to build strong communities and contribute to a healthy democracy. I believe we can get there, and the genesis for this movement is already underway. But reinvention will not happen through aspiration alone. It requires building a new architecture for how we collaborate, invest, and define success, anchored by a few clear, shared commitments.

First, a coherent north star. We should be able to say, simply and confidently, that every young person deserves strong academics, real preparation for life and work, the ability to participate in civic life, and a deep sense of belonging. Those are goals we can share nationally, even as communities design learning in ways that reflect their own values and context. Without shared guardrails, variation can widen inequity. With shared purpose, variation becomes a strength.

Second, a new way of working. For too long, education innovation has operated on a “lone hero” model—organizations with similar goals competing for funding, recognition, and scale. That approach has helped a few ideas grow quickly, but it has also left others behind and discouraged shared learning. A common public good requires a more collaborative architecture: Innovators and educators working side by side, sharing learning, building infrastructure together rather than jostling for limited resources.

Third, a new approach to funding. If we want different results, we have to fund the work differently. One-time grants cannot sustain structural redesign. We need patient capital—investment that gives leaders time to build, test, learn, and improve. That means funding not just new schools or models, but the enabling conditions that allow them to thrive: strong tools, professional learning, research, and implementation support. Funding for lasting change requires long-term commitment, and the courage to invest in collaboration and shared capacity, not just the next promising idea.

Fourth, true co-creation with communities. As learning expands beyond traditional classrooms, communities will rightly seek the freedom to shape education around their histories, aspirations, and values. But localization must be paired with shared responsibility. The broader ecosystem—funders, policy makers, intermediaries—must help build common definitions of quality, shared ways of learning from evidence, and funding structures that strengthen capacity over time. The goal is not a return to top-down mandates, nor a landscape of disconnected efforts, but aligned local leadership in service of a shared national purpose.

Fifth, disciplined learning and accountability. The north star defines where we are going. Accountability ensures we are getting there. We must be willing to try new models in real settings, learn from what works and what doesn’t, and refine accordingly. We must also hold ourselves accountable to a more comprehensive picture of student thriving, not just test scores, but academic growth, readiness for life and work, civic engagement, and long-term well-being.

Education is how a society renews itself. If we choose reinvention over retreat, our schools can help create a prosperous future defined not by scarcity or fear, but by opportunity, shared prosperity, and democratic vitality—one where young people find purpose, communities find connection, and every child knows they belong.

That is the promise of public education. And it is still within reach.

Addressing complex social challenges at scale requires strong, well-connected networks that can coordinate action, share learning, and adapt as conditions change. Whether in philanthropy, social investment, member alliances, or regional platforms, networks play a vital role in mobilizing resources, surfacing innovation, and supporting solutions across diverse contexts.

Yet a fundamental challenge persists: Many networks lack clear, current visibility into who their members are, what they do, and how their efforts align. Reliance on outdated directories, infrequent surveys, or anecdotal knowledge limits collaboration, progress tracking, and access to relevant opportunities. These gaps are often most acute in fast-changing or under-resourced environments, where information is fragmented or rarely updated.

In response, a growing range of networks—including grantee communities, professional alliances, funder collaboratives, and industry-wide partnerships focused on shared social or environmental goals—are beginning to adopt more dynamic, data-informed approaches. Tools such as AI-enabled analysis, automated research, and real-time feedback mechanisms are helping these groups replace static records with living, evolving views of network activity tailored to their unique data environments, geographies, and organizational types.

For the better part of a decade, our AI and data analytics company, Impact Intelligence has helped a range of networks—including international member alliances, funder collaboratives, professional associations, and alumni and awardee groups—understand what is happening across their communities and how best to serve them over time. In the process, we have noticed some common blind spots that thoughtfully designed, AI-supported approaches can bring to light.

What follows are snapshots of three core analytical capabilities that networks can apply incrementally, as well as a case study highlighting a shared analytical platform and a framework that organizations can use to rethink their own network intelligence.

Three Core Analytical Capabilities

1. AI-powered text analytics. General-purpose text mining and media analysis tools are now common across sectors. But more specialized applications designed for social and environmental contexts (for example, analyses drawing on publicly available publications and datasets from organizations like the OECD or the World Health Organization) can identify patterns such as recurring challenges highlighted across reports, shifts in policy focus over time, or regions where organizations consistently report certain issues. These insights help networks see which issue areas and members need the most attention and resources at any given time.

Take the Bayer Foundation, which sought to strengthen how it supports and engages alumni of its Women Entrepreneurs Award, a global program backing early-stage, women-led social enterprises. During our work together on the initiative, Peng Zhong, the foundation’s director of social innovation, explained that the program was responsible for managing an expanding, geographically distributed group of entrepreneurs. This made it difficult to consistently track how alumni enterprises were evolving. Important developments—such as new partnerships, media recognition, awards, and expansion into new markets—often surfaced late, intermittently, or only when alumni proactively shared updates. As a result, much of the network’s progress remained opaque, limiting timely engagement and evidence-based decision-making.

To address this, we introduced a monitoring approach. By continuously scanning organizational websites, media coverage, and other public channels, the system created a live, regularly refreshed overview of how alumni organizations were progressing over time. The system also generated curated monthly highlights that surfaced notable milestones and success stories across the portfolio, providing both immediate visibility and periodic synthesis.

The monitor freed a lean team from doing manual research and replaced fragmented, ad hoc tracking with a more reliable evidence base. While traditional criteria—such as financial statements and readiness assessments—remained central to evaluating ventures’ initial investment readiness, the monitoring insights provided ongoing validation of those early judgments. They helped the team sense-check assumptions over time, flag ventures requiring closer support or review, and increase confidence that selected awardees for the Women Entrepreneurs Award and accelerator program continued to demonstrate observable momentum. This enabled a shift from reactive tracking to more proactive engagement, better-targeted introductions, and more informed communications with funders and partners.

2. AI research agents with human validation. Many organizations already use this approach: AI agents identify potential organizations, initiatives, or trends at scale, and human researchers then review, refine, and enrich these findings. The key is to focus human analysis on areas where judgment, local knowledge, and ethical considerations matter most.

One example comes from our work with Google.org and Asian Venture Philanthropy Network (AVPN) on the AI Skilling initiative in the Asia-Pacific. The challenge was to understand a highly diverse and fragmented landscape of AI transition and digital skilling efforts across multiple countries, languages, and sectors, where no comprehensive or up-to-date mapping existed. In response, the project used AI research agents to scan more than 400,000 public sources, identifying approximately 20,000 digital skilling programs and highlighting skills that AI advances would likely affect. A survey of nearly 3,000 individuals across eight Asia-Pacific countries—capturing perspectives on barriers to access, relevance of training, and unmet needs—complemented this initial mapping. Human researchers then reviewed the combined findings, validating program classifications, identifying regional differences, and ensuring that groups such as women, persons with disabilities, and workers with low digital literacy were meaningfully represented.

The resulting analysis informed specific design decisions for the AI Opportunity Fund: Asia Pacific, including which learner groups to prioritize, how to differentiate support across countries, and how to embed outcome measurement into funded programs. For example, the identification of distinct skilling clusters helped the fund focus resources on workforce segments facing the highest transition risk, while survey insights shaped requirements around job readiness, accessibility, and continuity of learning. In this way, the research translated directly into how the organizations structured and deployed funding, rather than remaining a standalone study.

3. Voice-based interview agents. Sometimes, the fastest way to understand a community is simply to ask. But for many networks, especially those working across regions or languages, traditional survey and interview methods fall short. Scheduling interviews is logistically complex, and language diversity creates additional friction. And response rates for written surveys tend to be low, particularly when respondents are busy, under-resourced, or uncertain about how their input will be used. For many teams, participating in formal research also competes directly with day-to-day delivery work.

AI-powered voice agents that conduct conversational, multilingual, and on-demand interviews via the web or mobile phone can offer a practical alternative. Participants respond in their own words and at their own pace, without needing to coordinate calendars or navigate complex interfaces. This approach can be particularly useful for networks engaging social enterprises, nonprofits, small businesses, community-based organizations, or schools that have limited time or administrative capacity.

Voice interviews also address the rigidity of text-based surveys. Participants often share more detailed and emotionally rich insights when speaking aloud, especially in their native language. When responses are vague or incomplete, the voice agent can ask follow-up questions and probe deeper. This adaptive questioning makes the method especially valuable for exploratory research, impact validation, and learning-focused evaluations, where context and nuance matter as much as standardized metrics.

In 2025, our Interview Agent, an AI-powered platform for conducting and analyzing stakeholder interviews, supported an assessment of a flagship sustainability award backed by a national government by conducting in-depth, asynchronous interviews with representatives from winning organizations around the world, many of which have limited public information available. Traditional interviews were not feasible given the number of winners, time zone differences, and tight project timelines.

Interview Agent enabled each organization to share detailed reflections in their own words, including the outcomes of their work, the role the award played in enabling those outcomes, lessons they had learned, and their approaches to validating impact data. In some cases, the platform conducted separate interviews with different team members to help build a more complete and balanced picture of each organization’s experience.

The platform then analyzed these qualitative insights to provide a holistic view of how the award influenced winners’ visibility, credibility, access to opportunities, and ability to deliver sustained impact—findings that informed sustainability reporting and strategic planning in turn. This reduced the time and effort required to gather insights while expanding the reach and inclusiveness of the process. As a result, the dataset better reflected the diversity of experiences across geographies, organization sizes, and operational contexts, strengthening both the credibility and usefulness of the findings.

Case Study: Shared Analytical Platforms

The challenge to maintain a current, actionable understanding of member activity while operating across regions with different priorities, languages, and contexts is especially familiar to international networks, but it applies to funders, intermediaries, and large organizations working with regional chapters or country-level partners as well. These organizations often struggle to see what their members or partners are doing across regions, where efforts overlap, and where gaps or collaboration opportunities exist. In this context, a shared analytical platform with regionally tailored dashboards can help improve visibility, coordination, and cross-network learning.

One example comes from our work with several regional venture philanthropy networks—including Latimpacto, African Venture Philanthropy Alliance (AVPA), and AVPN. Together, these networks represent more than 1,000 foundations, impact investors, corporations, and international NGOs. Like many membership-based networks, they had access to large amounts of information about their members, but when we started working with them, that information was fragmented across websites, reports, news coverage, and informal updates, making it difficult to see patterns or identify opportunities for collaboration in real time.

Rather than adopting a single, uniform model, the networks focused on building a shared analytical platform that they could adapt locally. Each network collaborated on the design of its own monitoring approach, shaped by regional priorities and strategic questions, while still aligning on baseline categories to compare activity and trends consistently.

For example, Latimpacto emphasized a need to distinguish between rural and urban community development in Latin America and to develop more nuanced categories of marginalized communities, including economic vulnerability, identity-based exclusion, and racial marginalization. AVPA wanted greater visibility into catalytic capital and financial instruments in Africa, reflecting ongoing regional debates about innovative financing mechanisms. And AVPN expressed growing interest in tracking faith-based giving in Asia, given its cultural and strategic importance in many markets.

These inputs fed into the shared platform, known as Social Investment in Action, allowing partners to see both region-specific insights and structured views of member activity within their own network. The platform is continuously updated with new activities each month, providing a current and evolving picture of the landscape. Baseline categories included areas such as social causes, beneficiary groups, and types of support, including both financial and non-financial contributions. For example, users could explore how their organizations distributed activities across different causes and deployed various forms of capital and support. The platform organized all data within a consistent framework, while allowing networks to define and apply categories according to their unique regional priorities.

Over a four-year period, the approach surfaced more than 54,000 documented member activities—drawing on public sources such as news articles, organizational updates, and announcements—and helped map more than $4 trillion in social investments. This allowed the networks to explore where capital was flowing, which issue areas were gaining momentum, and where opportunities for collaboration were emerging. It also changed decision-making. Network teams shifted from periodic, retrospective reporting to ongoing analysis, cross-regional learning, and more-targeted support for members based on real-time signals rather than anecdotal updates.

Manuela Jiménez López, Latimpacto’s knowledge coordinator, shared in a meeting with our team that members initially used the Social Investment in Action - Latin America (SIAL) platform to track capital flows and emerging themes but later began using it in more-practical ways. One member organization, Fundación Grupo Social, for example, was conducting an analysis across sectors (including environment, water and sanitation, road infrastructure, income generation, and education) with the aim of identifying potential national and international partners for future collaboration. In the past, this would have required weeks of manual research, personal outreach, and reliance on partial or outdated information. As Fundación Grupo Social noted, the SIAL platform’s ability to filter data by social causes and SDGs made it possible to move from fragmented, organization-level research to a more comprehensive, “macro” view of the ecosystem. This enabled the team to map potential partners more systematically and initiate connections through Latimpacto more quickly, more proactively, and with greater confidence.

The takeaway is not the creation of a bespoke platform, but the design principle behind it: separating a common analytical backbone from locally defined categories and priorities. Even at smaller scales, this approach can help organizations build shared intelligence that supports coordination and learning without forcing uniform reporting or erasing regional nuance. In this case, the implication for the field is that strengthening knowledge infrastructure can be as important as mobilizing capital itself.

A Framework for Rethinking Network Intelligence

For networks and community-based organizations new to these approaches, one of the most useful starting points is ecosystem mapping—creating a baseline view of what organizations are involved in what, how they are connected, and where information gaps exist. This does not need to be complex. A network might begin by listing its core members, partners, and funders, then grouping them by geography, issue area, or role. From there, it can add simple layers of information, such as who each organization collaborates with most often and where activity appears concentrated or sparse.

Developing a shared internal knowledge base is another good place to start, as it helps preserve institutional memory. This can include notes from past engagements, such as program interactions or partnership discussions, summaries of member activity, and links to relevant external sources, including media coverage and organizational websites, all organized so that members can update them over time.

It is also useful to step back and examine how the network gets work done. Mapping a typical process, such as how staff collect member updates or identify partnerships, and then imagining what that process would look like if time and resources were not constraints, can be revealing. Comparing this “ideal state” with current, staff-intensive workflows helps clarify where automation or AI-supported tools might add value, and where human judgment or relationship-building should remain central.

The following questions can help organizations guide this reflection:

• Do we have a reliable picture of what our members or partners are doing right now? Can we quickly see which members are actively delivering programs, expanding into new regions, or forming new partnerships, or are we relying on annual reports, outdated directories, or informal updates?
• Where are the blind spots in the information we already collect? Smaller organizations, rural initiatives, or groups working in less visible issue areas may be underrepresented because they lack the capacity to produce regular reports or respond to surveys.
• Where would small, low-risk experiments help us test what AI can meaningfully support? One starting point might be piloting automated analysis of public updates from a subset of members, such as newsletters or websites, before applying it across the full network.
• What lightweight hardware or software could help us listen better, not just report more? Short voice-based interviews, simple digital forms, or automated monitoring of public sources can help capture insights from members who rarely engage through formal reporting channels.

A growing array of digital tools and resources can support these early steps. Nonprofits beginning to explore responsible AI can take advantage of programs such as the AWS Nonprofit Credit Program, which provides promotional credits to help organizations modernize their infrastructure. The Microsoft Azure grant offers annual service credits and a structured pathway that begins with migrating existing systems to the cloud and can extend to building AI-supported applications. Google also offers freely accessible courses on AI literacy and foundational AI skills, which can help teams build shared understanding before introducing new tools or workflows.

Setting clear priorities helps focus limited energy on the needs with the greatest potential impact, and small, low-risk pilots create space to test and learn, allowing teams to adapt as they discover what works. Over time, organizations can scale the approaches that demonstrate value, strengthening both internal workflows and their capacity to act on real-time intelligence.

Philanthropy’s misunderstanding of risk and the “guardrails” funders impose to minimize it have created a paradox: Under-resourced nonprofits that will never be fully equipped to effect the lasting systemic change that philanthropy seeks. This misalignment stems from investing in programs without also investing in institutions.

While there have been promising shifts toward trust-based philanthropy and flexible, multi-year grants in recent years, unrestricted funding for nonprofits comprises less than 40 percent of grants from private foundations. Funders continue to rely on guardrails, such as restricted, project-based funding, short-term grants, and extensive reporting requirements, as their primary tools to help ensure returns on social investments. But when nonprofits do not have enough liquid unrestricted net assets (LUNA) to cover their liabilities, they are at risk of stagnation, illiquidity, and even insolvency. In other words, nonprofits also need to build their net assets.

There is a solution: Enterprise capital for nonprofits, or multi-year, unrestricted funding that strengthens their financial position. While enterprise capital shares characteristics with other funding approaches like general operating support, its purpose and uses are different. Rather than providing revenue to cover day-to-day expenses, enterprise capital builds net assets, enabling nonprofits to make investments in revenue-generation strategies, maintain resources to mitigate cash flow mismatches, and adapt to shifting macro environments like the government funding uncertainties of the past year. By strengthening organizational capacity, financial resilience, and adaptability, enterprise capital helps nonprofits and funders alike deliver the ambitious systemic change they seek.

Undercapitalizing Creates Risk

Funders and nonprofit leaders often think about effective funding for nonprofits in terms of ensuring enough revenue to cover recurring expenses, such as program administration, operations, and staff salaries. Many nonprofits have strong, long-standing relationships with funders who provide general operating support or programmatic support that covers these costs. On paper, organizations may even appear wealthy given the expanding size of their budgets. This, however, masks the fact that they are increasingly asset-constrained. As the budget expands, monthly expenses increase, meaning there are fewer resources (net assets) available to cover costs should funding delays or disruptions occur.

For example, a youth-services organization in New York experienced rapid revenue growth ($10 million revenue increase over five years) but did not grow its balance sheet in parallel. This created a dangerous mismatch between its expanded operations and its financial foundation. The nonprofit provides essential services to vulnerable youth, and a large portion of its revenue comes from state government contracts for housing and mental health services. Since payment is only received once services have been delivered, the organization must spend cash upfront before it is reimbursed.

Many of the nonprofit’s funders had given unrestricted support for several consecutive years, but few funders had provided enterprise capital specifically to align with the organization’s business model. As a result, net assets were low when compared to the overall budget, and two-thirds of net assets were restricted, leaving the organization with limited resources to continue operating through funding disruptions. The organization was effectively one small disaster away from illiquidity, despite successful fundraising, an outstanding reputation, and a track record of program delivery. By neglecting the balance sheet, funders overlooked a critical ingredient for protecting programs and advancing financial sustainability.

For funders of organizations like this one, the analysis is simple: What financial resources does the enterprise require to continue operating without risk of running out of cash? For well-capitalized organizations—those with sufficient levels of LUNA—the answer may simply be more general operating support or full-cost program grants. For others, the solution could be a one-time enterprise capital injection that enables them to build new revenue streams, access low-cost working capital loans or lines of credit, or deploy cash to function as a financial reserve.

From Budgets to Enterprise Sustainability

Funders can protect their social investments by shifting from a sole focus on their grantees’ annual income and expenses to a comprehensive focus on the business model as revealed through both the budget and the balance sheet, the latter of which reveals capital structure and liquidity position. Think of a nonprofit’s capital structure like a building’s foundation. The programs and services are the visible structure above ground—what funders and the public see and admire. But without a solid foundation below, even a seemingly sturdy building will erode over time.

A nonprofit’s capital structure is the financial position invisible to most observers but essential for stability, growth, and weathering storms. Just as a building’s foundation must be proportionate to its height and designed for local environmental conditions, a nonprofit’s capital structure must be aligned with its business model, growth trajectory, and the funding environment in which it operates to ensure that the type of funding—long-term, short-term or permanent—matches the uses of funds. A true risk assessment requires funders to examine the balance sheet to understand whether a nonprofit’s foundation can support its structure.

In the for-profit world, investors understand this intuitively. For-profit companies build their capital structures with equity investments that allow businesses to innovate, expand, and absorb risk, and are supplemented with working capital to smooth cash flow and long-term debt for major investments aligned with revenue-generating activities. Tech startups often operate at a loss for years (sometimes decades) while building infrastructure and market share, backed by patient equity capital from investors who understand that building a sustainable business model takes time. Why don’t we extend the same patience when funding the big ideas that will solve society’s biggest social problems?

Many nonprofits receive general operating support and program grants that help meet budgetary needs but do little to address the overall financial position of the organization. In addition, they often lack access to low-cost working capital to match receivables and payables and operate with little to no growth capital for infrastructure investments (such as investment in staff, technology, or real estate) or revenue-generating activities.

A healthy capital structure is one in which funding is designed to align with an organization’s assets, liabilities, and net assets. For example, a nonprofit affordable housing developer needs multiple years of flexible funding to support the equity required to raise debt and to succeed during the development process, given the long-term nature of real estate development. This long-term source of funds matches a long-term use of funds.

Capital Structure to Weather Uncertainty

Big Thought, an education nonprofit in Dallas, is an example of an organization that was able to use enterprise capital to build its financial foundation before the storm hit.

Big Thought began in 1987 as a small organization with a $300,000 annual budget, working to close educational opportunity gaps in marginalized communities, and faced the typical challenges of unpredictable funding cycles (from the public and philanthropic sectors) and restricted grants. In response, Big Thought sought longer-term support to sustain the organization. This included $12.85 million in enterprise capital funding from the Wallace Foundation between 2011 and 2024 to support the design and implementation of multiple programmatic initiatives. The funding provided the foundational capital to launch the Big Thought Institute, an initiative to collect and document best practices in learning methods and systems, and Thriving Minds, an after-school program serving both educational institutions and community organizations. Over the past decade, these programs have leveraged $36.6 million in additional funding from both the public and philanthropic sectors, illustrating the scale of implementation and capacity enterprise capital helped make possible.

These enterprise investments, and the organizational infrastructure and revenue pathways they enabled Big Thought to build, have been essential in helping the organization survive and thrive despite recent seismic shifts in public and private funding since the pandemic, including recent federal cuts and changes in philanthropic priorities. Despite these cuts, Big Thought has not had to compromise mission delivery because enterprise capital enabled the organization to invest in diversified revenue pathways while exploring how to lower operating costs through technology applications.

Rethinking Risk for Greater Impact

For funders seeking to maximize impact, the path forward requires four fundamental shifts:

1. Focus on net assets, not just the budget. Balance sheet strength is fundamental to sustainable mission delivery. This begins with training your team to read the financial statements of their grantees and identify the strength (or lack thereof) of their net assets in the context of their mission and lines of business. Funders should design an underwriting process that not only assesses an organization’s mission alignment and staff capacity but also includes a review of the balance sheet’s role in achieving its goals.
2. Consider the risk that short-term, restricted funding may create for nonprofits. Evaluate whether restrictions actually enable grantees to operate programs efficiently and maximize impact. If you are providing general operating support, are you growing the organization’s balance sheet in parallel? Deepen your understanding of how an organization operates—both internally and in the communities it serves. Reflect on the full range of services and capacities necessary to achieve its impact and how the provision of additional funding for net assets can supplement both program and service delivery.
3. Identify non-financial ways to support your grantees. Check in on grantees. Ask what services they need while being transparent about what you can offer. Candid conversations offer the platform to align the goals of both grant maker and grantee by ensuring that the funder understands the realities driving the grantee’s success and raising up all the elements that must be addressed to ensure the impact that both funders and grantees expect.
4. Respond to the moment. The financial realities of this moment place a special premium on moving more quickly and creatively to address the ongoing challenges facing the social sector. Consider how new financial collaborations can overcome specific institutional constraints to move more funding faster.

As numerous studies and MacKenzie Scott’s giving have demonstrated, enterprise capital works. The nonprofit sector doesn’t need more guardrails—it needs funders willing to invest with the scale and patience necessary to solve society’s most vexing challenges.

Both funders and nonprofits have long seen due diligence as a vetting exercise that primarily supports decisions to fund organizations or not. Yet when funders set about due diligence in the traditional way—assessing financial health, governance structures, and legal compliance through rigid, standardized procedures—they can overlook the realities in which nonprofits operate. This approach, which stems from a widespread corporate mindset, perceives risk primarily as a threat that funders should identify and mitigate, if not avoid. It also exposes a fundamental contradiction in the sector: Funders that adopt due diligence practices of the corporate world are often reluctant to embrace the same level of risk that profit-driven organizations take in pursuit of financial return. Due diligence then becomes a binary risk assessment based on criteria that are detached from the environments in which grantee partners operate, when it should be a meaningful exploration of organizations’ potential. And while its intent is rightly rooted in accountability, it has evolved into an overly complex process, particularly for grassroots organizations operating in resource-constrained or politically sensitive contexts.

As the philanthropic and development sectors’ awareness of these limitations has grown, so has consensus that funders need to fundamentally rethink the purpose and value of due diligence frameworks. What if funders viewed due diligence principally as an opportunity to develop deeper relationships with grantee partners? By shifting the focus from scrutiny to support, could philanthropy use due diligence as a catalyst for nonprofit growth? What would this transformation require from philanthropy? And what kind of practical changes could funders apply to their own compliance processes to ensure that their funding is effective and delivers meaningful impact?

Drawing on regular exchanges with nonprofits, peer funders, consultants, and researchers, AmplifyChange—a UK‑based funder supporting sexual and reproductive health and rights across Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East—identified three shifts philanthropy needs to make to meaningfully transform compliance practices. These include using new terminology, taking a strengthening-oriented approach, and adopting a different perception of risk.

1. A Shift in Language and Attitude

Deliberately training due diligence assessors to approach their work with empathy and respect can transform the assessment process into a constructive and trust-building experience. Placing the focus on learning, rather than ticking boxes and identifying weaknesses, reframes due diligence as a conversation where funders pay as much attention to organizations’ strengths as they do to areas for growth.

The language funders use throughout the process is therefore important. Jargon that emphasizes failings rather than opportunities for growth can create confusion and anxiety. It can also demotivate grantee partners and exacerbate power imbalances. Rather than “due diligence,” for example, funders can use words that demonstrate a genuine interest in potential partners, such as “getting to know your organization better.” They can also replace words such as “gaps,” “shortcomings,” and “findings” with more supportive terms, such as “areas for growth,” opportunities for improvement,” and “recommendations.”

Assessors should also strive to deeply understand an organization’s internal practices and culture. Many organizations have policies on paper that they rarely apply. Instead of yes/no questions, for instance, funders can incorporate open questions that allow potential partners to explain how they operate in detail and provide examples to help elucidate intent. Including meetings or calls in the process also gives organizations the chance to explain their processes and practices more fully.

Finally, whenever feasible, funders should engage locally rooted due diligence consultants who can offer deep contextual expertise, including knowledge of local nonprofit laws, applicable regulatory requirements, and local language fluency. Their involvement creates an environment where organizations feel more comfortable sharing information openly and candidly. It also indicates that funders recognize their limited understanding of the local context and are taking steps to address it.

In several African and South Asian countries, for example, it has become increasingly difficult for nonprofits to receive foreign funding without meeting rigorous registration and banking requirements. In one case, an organization based in Bangladesh completed its due diligence assessment, with a recommendation to the funder to approve the grant. However, it subsequently became clear that the organization did not hold the appropriate registration to receive foreign funding.

Hiring a due diligence consultant with strong local expertise from the outset could have prevented false hope and subsequent disappointment, and saved both parties considerable time and resources. This situation also presented a significant reputational risk for the funder, as it could have suggested gaps in its due diligence approach.

2. A Shift in Approach Toward Learning Together

When due diligence identifies areas where organizations’ structures and processes could benefit from improvements, funders should consider taking a strengthening-oriented approach that embeds local context.

Consider a low-capacity grassroots organization operating in a fragile setting—a conflict‑affected country or a country under an authoritarian regime. The organization works in an environment where corruption is widespread, formal banking systems are unreliable, staff face serious safety risks, their operations are subject to intense scrutiny, resources are scarce, and recruiting qualified personnel (particularly in finance and compliance) is extremely challenging. A traditional due diligence process would likely flag this organization as high risk and unfundable. Reasons may include the absence of robust governance structures, a heavy reliance on manual bookkeeping with unexperienced finance staff, a lack of essential financial policies and procedures, and weak internal controls environment.

Integrating these contextual realities into the assessment process helps funders identify the organizations most capable of driving lasting and meaningful change. With appropriate financial and human support, these organizations can strengthen their resilience by adopting tools and practices that help them navigate profound uncertainty. A strengthening-oriented due diligence approach, then, would ask: What support would enable this organization to thrive and effectively accomplish its mission? Generally, the answer is grantee-led, adaptable, and long-term capacity-building plans, which may include hiring an experienced consultant to support the implementation of new policies and processes, providing board and staff training, or acquiring an accounting system.

This approach helps lay a strong foundation for effective and lasting partnerships, but it should also extend far beyond the due diligence phase. By offering day-to-day support, being available to answer questions about donors’ compliance requirements, providing access to guidance repositories, and delivering capacity-building opportunities such as in-person and in-country convenings, funders can demonstrate their ongoing commitment to the organizations they invest in.

The evolution of Conseils et Appui pour l’Education à la Base (CAEB), an organization in Mali that supports community development and humanitarian programming, illustrates the success of this long-term, learning and strengthening-oriented approach. Since AmplifyChange provided CAEB with a $10,000 grant in 2017, CAEB has grown to manage its own regional fund, Dambe Fund. To implement improvements identified during its due diligence process, CAEB allocated part of its initial funding to organizational strengthening: staff training, acquiring IT systems and equipment, developing essential policies, reinforcing its governance structure, and participating in AmplifyChange’s in‑country convenings and virtual training opportunities. Over time, CAEB secured more than $5 million in long‑term funding from AmplifyChange, giving it the stability it needed to build a strong team of programming and finance experts, and making it a highly robust organization capable of attracting support from other donors. Before becoming a grant maker itself, CAEB staff shadowed the AmplifyChange team to learn from them and later adapted AmplifyChange’s internal processes to their local realities. This approach is especially strategic in countries where structural and security constraints limit access for US and European funders.

Another approach to continuous learning is actively soliciting feedback from partner organizations. Although many funders do this, feedback from nonprofits often suggests that funders do not always consider or fully understand their perspectives, particularly when there is no follow-up. Creating structured and dedicated channels for open dialogue—whether on platforms like Circle or WhatsApp, during in-person meetings or workshops, or via a survey provider—helps funders understand the evolving challenges and aspirations of grantee partners, and refine their operational workflows, internal processes, and decision-making accordingly. It also strengthens trust and transparency. These conversations should go beyond assessing the mechanics of the process itself and open up forward‑looking dialogue on topics such as opportunities for non‑financial support; issues related to equity, inclusion, and power dynamics; and long‑term impact and learning.

Engaging with other donors is also a powerful way to strengthen internal processes and uncover innovative grant‑making approaches. Practical, example-driven conversations—for instance, exchanging experiences on developing a common due diligence framework, exploring how artificial intelligence can support compliance functions, or comparing practices around risk‑tolerant funding models—can be especially valuable. Funders operating outside the region they fund should consider meeting with regional and local grant makers about their due diligence and financial monitoring processes to understand on-the-ground realities and considerations they may otherwise overlook.

3. A Shift in Risk Perception

Philanthropy must also acknowledge that grantee partners working in complex or hostile environments bear significant risks, including physical and security risks, psychosocial and well‑being pressures, community and reputational risks, and operational and financial vulnerabilities. Funders genuinely committed to achieving meaningful impact must be willing to embrace these risks rather than shy away from them. Doing so requires a shift in mindset, from risk aversion to risk-sharing, and a willingness to support organizations that may not meet the conventional standards of compliance but are nonetheless essential within their communities.

To be effective, funders need to develop thoughtful, proactive risk-mitigation strategies in close collaboration with in-country partners, whose local knowledge is invaluable to shaping solutions that truly fit the context. For example, formally registering an organization focused on LGBTI+ issues in Ethiopia is legally impossible and criminalized. If a funder requires that all organizations working on this issue are legally registered before it provides support, none will qualify—even though they might be the key to changing social norms and legal reform.

Openness to alternative approaches, particularly those shaped by local insights, helps funders build trust from the outset, and many practical and compliant options exist—including fiscal sponsorship, funding channels outside traditional banking systems like Wise or Amanacard, and support for legal pathways to register in neighboring countries. These forms of flexible support not only allow nonprofits to operate in restrictive environments but also give them a chance to grow, strengthen their governance and internal controls, and ultimately become more resilient. In these cases, embracing risk is not an act of recklessness; it is an organizational, strategic imperative.

Supporting the development of civil society organizations is essential to ensuring that they remain robust, credible, and impactful within their unique contexts, and the first step toward making that possible is a thoughtful due diligence process. Transforming due diligence requires more than a few small tweaks; it demands a fundamental reorientation of language, behavior, and strategy among funders. But when it is reframed as a collaborative process rather than just a prerequisite for funding, it becomes a very powerful tool.

When Henry Ford built the Model T assembly line in 1913, the 800 percent increase in productivity (over craft-based production) made the American middle class possible. But it required a bargain: Workers would check their humanity at the factory door for eight hours a day. The system was perfect. Humans needed to adapt to it.

My great-grandfather took that bargain. He worked in an auto factory in Dearborn, Michigan. One day, walking to the water fountain during a break, he had a heart attack and died on the spot. The line kept moving.

It is a cruel irony that even though their purpose is to facilitate human flourishing, human services organizations inherited this same operating system, designed for human extraction. Community health centers, addiction recovery programs, homeless services, mental health agencies—all of them operate on MECE hierarchies, need-to-know information flow, and compliance-focused performance metrics—with chain of command as the answer to every question. The sector attracts people who want to make a difference, then it manages them using assembly line logic.

The result is predictable: The most dedicated staff burn out fastest, not despite their commitment but because of it.

What’s missing is not better leadership training or more resilient employees. It’s a different kind of system, what I call a breathing organization: One whose structure allows its people to move between activation and recovery with ease, not as cogs in a machine, constrained by the system, but as human beings with agency over their own rhythm. In a braced organization, people cycle between effort and exhaustion, between compliance and collapse; the breath is always held or shallow, waiting for the next demand. A breathing organization is designed so the exhale is actually possible.

We never stopped running Ford’s mechanistic operating system. We just moved it from the factory floor to the office, from manufacturing to knowledge work, from making cars to making policy. Best practices. Performance reviews. KPIs. Even "wellness programs" often function as optimization tools: How do we make humans tolerate the assembly line better?

The problem isn’t that these systems optimize for the wrong thing. Ford optimized for widgets per hour. What do modern human services organizations optimize for?

If the assembly line represents one way of coordinating human effort, the tea ceremony represents another.

The Tea Model

In 16th-century Japan, warlords optimized for something different. During the Warring States period (1467-1603), when the country fragmented into rival domains and violence saturated daily life, an unexpected cultural institution flourished: the tea ceremony. This wasn’t a coincidence: Tea masters like Sen no Rikyū didn’t create peaceful retreats from power, but, rather, bounded spaces where power could be negotiated without bloodshed. Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi, two of Japan’s most ruthless warlords, used tea gatherings to rank allies, signal favor, and formalize status.

The tearoom became a diplomatic venue where armed rivals could meet without drawing blood, in short; it didn’t replace political maneuvering, but gave it choreography, dance steps instead of lock steps. It forced rivals to be human instead of war machines.

Here’s what matters for organizational design: The structure that enforced hierarchy also regulated nervous systems. When enemies entered a tearoom, the architectural constraints did real work. The nijiri-guchi (crawling-in entrance) forces everyone—regardless of rank—to bow low enough that a samurai must leave his sword outside. The prescribed movements eliminate the cognitive load of social improvisation. The ma (negative space, deliberate pauses) aren’t breaks from the ritual—they’re structural elements as essential as the movements themselves. Shared focus on a single object—the bowl, the scroll, the flower arrangement—created what modern polyvagal theory calls a “co-regulatory environment”: mutual cues of safety that allowed threatened nervous systems to downshift from hypervigilance.

The ritual didn’t eliminate the samurai’s sword, but created conditions where the sword could be set aside temporarily. Then the ritual was repeated. Daily. For lifetimes. Until the nervous system pattern became embedded.

The lesson is not to import tea ceremonies into boardrooms; the tea ceremony was not a model of egalitarianism or enlightenment. But ritual architecture can be engineered to shape nervous systems, and such engineering is as important as strategic planning or financial management. Physical constraints, prescribed movements, and structural silence can coordinate human nervous systems under stress. And our rituals of quarterly reviews, status meetings, org charts, and “professional development” do coordinate human behavior.

The question is: toward what end? The assembly line had rituals—time cards. Factory whistles. Synchronized movements. Coffee breaks measured in minutes—all designed to extract maximum output from human bodies. We inherited those rituals and moved them into Outlook calendars and Slack channels.

In human services, where stress is chronic and resources are perpetually scarce, the need for structured co-regulation is even greater than in corporate settings. The question isn’t whether to have rituals that shape nervous systems—every organization already has them. The question is whether those rituals are designed for sustainable coordination or extractive efficiency.

From Rituals to Infrastructure

Tea ceremony thrived during Japan’s most violent centuries because it created pockets where a different reality was possible, and repeated them until they became infrastructure. This is also what distinguishes genuine organizational transformation from one-off interventions: That it isn’t performed once and abandoned, but practiced daily, refined across generations, and embedded into the social fabric until its nervous system effects become predictable and reproducible. Tea masters had 500 years to perfect what modern change management consultants are asked to accomplish in a quarterly engagement. And while you don’t have five centuries, you do have Monday morning. The rituals you design now will either extract or sustain the humans who come after you.

Modern organizations tend to attempt transformation through the opposite approach: intensive one-time interventions followed by return to normal operations. What is needed is not another retreat, or better workshops. What it takes is designed repetition of new nervous system patterns until they become the default.

Tea masters understood that you don’t transform a nervous system with information. You transform it with repeated embodied practice in structured environments until new responses become automatic. Organizations always have rituals—punch clocks or town squares, chain of command or crawling-in entrances, need-to-know information flow or mission control windows. The question is what are our rituals actually building? (And are we willing to repeat them long enough to find out?)

Four Principles of a Breathing Organization

What does it look like to redesign organizational rituals for sustainable coordination rather than extraction?

1. Design for shared reality, not need-to-know. Make critical work visible by default. Ask: What does everyone need to see to act wisely? Open dashboards. Transparent workflows. Physical or digital spaces where different staff levels intersect without requiring permission.

Ask: Where do different staff levels physically intersect? What information is visible to whom by default rather than by request? When someone outside their domain flags an issue, what’s the structural response—gratitude or gatekeeping?

2. Build silence into coordination. Replace performative “Any questions?” moments with structural pauses. Thirty seconds of silence after proposals before discussion. Two minutes of individual writing before group conversation. Silence isn’t dead time—it’s the neurological shift from reactive to reflective processing.

This isn’t comfortable at first. The initial silence feels excruciating. People check phones, shuffle papers, and avoid eye contact. Then, over repetitions, the nervous system learns: This pause is safe. Thoughts can form that wouldn’t surface in immediate reaction. The person who never speaks first begins contributing. The person who always speaks first begins listening.

After six months of practiced silence, it stops being “that weird thing we do” and becomes “how we process and make decisions.”

3. Measure sustainability alongside output. Don’t abandon performance metrics—supplement them with leading indicators of organizational health. How many people are still here in three years? What percentage of staff report having space to think, not just execute? How often do junior people successfully challenge senior decisions? How many ideas come from outside assigned domains?

In human services, this means measuring not just clients served per full-time equivalent, but: How many staff are still here after two years? What percentage of frontline workers report having time to build genuine relationships with the people they serve rather than just processing cases? How often do line staff successfully advocate for system changes based on what they’re seeing? These aren’t soft metrics. They’re leading indicators of whether your organization can sustain its mission when federal funding contracts and labor markets tighten.

At one human services organization I work with, staff demonstrated this principle during the 2025 SNAP crisis. When long lines of clients formed outside in the cold waiting for emergency food assistance, frontline workers didn’t wait for leadership permission. They saw what needed to happen, moved vending machines out of a staff break room, and began processing food orders there. The improvisation worked so well they kept the new system after the crisis passed. The CEO has been praising them ever since—not because they followed protocol, but because they trusted their intelligence enough to override it when the mission required it. No policy authorized this. The culture allowed it.

That’s what breathing organizations do: They create conditions where staff can access collective intelligence in real time, not just when leadership approves.

4. Require leaders to submit to the rituals. If leaders bypass the rituals, the system dies. No VIP lanes. No “we’ll skip the pause this time.” I’ve worked with organizations that installed every right practice—designed silence in meetings, distributed authority, sustainability metrics—and watched them wither within months. In one community mental health organization, leadership created protocols for staff-led case consultations with structured reflection time and cross-disciplinary input—then kept canceling them when productivity metrics dipped. When a senior leader interrupted the 30-second pause to “move things along,” the nervous system lesson was instant and permanent: The ritual is performative, not real.

The most critical ownership is the leader’s ownership of actually maintaining the conditions for ownership. Which means staying vigilant about how you let people fail, how you keep yourself in check, whether you personally honor the pauses and protocols you’ve designed. If you don’t, no one else will. And your culture won’t change.

This is what tea masters understood viscerally: The host enters through the same small door, performs the same careful movements, and observes the same silence. The ritual has no exemptions. Status doesn’t excuse you from the form—it obligates you to it more completely.

It’s About Time

We’re facing what 16th-century Japan faced: social fragmentation, economic anxiety, the erosion of meaning-making structures. The tea ceremony didn’t solve those problems. But it created infrastructure for remaining human inside them. Modern organizations face the same choice: Will our rituals serve extraction or sustainability? Compliance or adaptation? The Model T or the breathing organism?

Tea masters had five centuries. You have the span of your leadership tenure. But the principle is identical: New nervous system patterns require repeated practice in structured environments. One leadership offsite cannot override decades of assembly-line muscle memory. What can override it is different structures, embodied by leadership, practiced by everyone, until they become normal. Not because they’re better ideas, but because they’re consistently reinforced realities.

The question isn’t whether these practices sound good. Most people would agree they do. The question is: Are you willing to practice them repeatedly, through the awkward early stages when they feel inefficient, until they become embedded? Are you willing to measure their effects over years rather than quarters? Are you willing to redesign physical and informational architecture, not just adjust meeting agendas? And most critically: Are you willing to submit to the structures you create?