Community Center for Education Results 

Established in 2009 and housed at The Seattle Foundation for its first two years of operation, the Community Center for Education Results (CCER) was formed in response to profound demographic and economic shifts occurring across the King County. The County’s low-income populations are now concentrated in its southern suburbs far more than its urban core. Two-thirds of all new jobs require some form of post-secondary credential. The region’s traditional institutions, including public education systems, must adapt to these changing conditions but don’t necessarily have the tools or support to do so. CCER launched the ambitious Road Map Project in 2010 to address the education needs and aspirations of young people in South King County and South Seattle. The CCER team has spent the ensuing two years building a broad, diverse regional partnership aimed at dramatically improving student achievement from cradle to career. As the steward of a “collective impact” movement that spans many different jurisdictions and stakeholders in pursuit of a shared goal, CCER is seeking to effect significant systems change across the education continuum.

Proven Success
The CCER team has successfully juggled multiple, complex demands, including: 1) building the comprehensive, long-term collaborations required to develop and implement regional action-plans in areas like high-school-to-college completion and PreK-to-third-grade education; 2) writing and disseminating the data-rich “Road Map Project Baseline Report” in December 2011, an analysis of how our public education system is failing too many low-income children and families, and 3) catalyzing first-time “wins” with campaigns to increase middle-school program enrollment in the College Bound Scholarship Program (for which 93% of eligible youth signed up in 2011), as well as increasing the number of graduating College-Bound scholarship seniors applying for federal financial aid (71% of students in this cohort have filed their federal aid forms).

Use of Best Practices
With a small staff and very few models to emulate, CCER is seeking to actualize the theory of “collective-impact”—emulating promising practices forged by other community-change initiatives like STRIVE in Cincinnati. CCER has been creative, nimble, and highly collaborative in forging “inside and outside the system” strategies to drive large-scale improvements in education outcomes for low-income students and children of color.

Collaboration
CCER’s lack of formal authority defuses any fears of top-down mandates, enabling the organization to elicit the trust and participation of many different partners.