Business Commons^™

The Aaacf Community Scholarship Program: A Strategic Approach To Building Community, Shelley Strickland, Carmen M. Mccallum

The Foundation Review

Five years ago, the Ann Arbor Area Community Foundation decided to take a strategic approach to offering college scholarships that would address gaps in educational achievement among local students. To increase the impact of its scholarship program, the foundation shifted its emphasis from one-time awards to promoting degree attainment, and determined that the criteria for new scholarships would be based on impact data instead of donor intent.

The Community Scholarship Program awards multiyear scholarships to local students of color, students from low-income families, and first-generation college students, and provides them with a dedicated college success coach to help them successfully …

Emergent Learning: Increasing The Impact Of Foundation-Driven Strategies To Support College Enrollment And Completion, Kimberly Hanauer, Stacy Sneed, Bill Debaun

The Foundation Review

This article examines lessons learned as part of the continued development of the Get2College Pilot School Program, an initiative of the Woodward Hines Education Foundation, designed to test a strategy for increasing college enrollment among Mississippi students through greater college exploration opportunities and application and financial aid supports.

While a review of the first three years of the pilot found it had an impact on college-going culture at its eight participating schools, Get2College found no significant increase in college enrollment over the 2016–2018 academic years and a retrospective analysis revealed flaws in the program’s design and theory of change. In …

Scaling Rural Access: One Foundation’S Partnership To Expand Fafsa Completion Across Mississippi, B. Tait Kellogg, Ann Hendrick, Kierstan Dufour, Patricia Steele

The Foundation Review

This article highlights Get2College, a program by the Woodward Hines Education Foundation that provide financial aid counseling to Mississippi high school students, and outlines a study that assessed efforts to scale the FAFSA completion initiative to increase the number of students statewide who complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

Get2College’s approach to scaling involved a partnership with the state’s rurally based community colleges and leveraged their established support networks to expand its outreach to the state’s often underserved students and increase FAFSA completion rates among that population.

In rural states like Mississippi, underresourced groups are sometimes left …

Measuring Dimensions Of Network Functioning: The Knowhow2go Network Survey, Tania Jarosewich, Nushina Mir, Linda Simkin

The Foundation Review

· As foundations more often encourage networks and other interorganizational strategies, they need tools to measure network effectiveness and outcomes. Gathering network members’ perspectives on their engagement with the network can provide insights and avenues for improvement.

· This article describes a network survey that was created for Lumina Foundation’s KnowHow2GO initiative, which focused on strengthening college access networks.

· The network survey measures five dimensions of effective networks: network management; sustainable service systems; data-driven decision making; policy and advocacy; and knowledge development and dissemination.

· The network survey provided useful information for the foundation, initiative partners, technicalassistance providers, network …

Models Of Social Change: Community Foundations And Agenda Setting, Nathan Duan-Barnett, Jessica Wangelin, Haley Lamm

The Foundation Review

· This article focuses on a particular approach to large-scale, community-based educational change – Local College Access Networks in the state of Michigan – to answer two key questions: What factors serve to shape the social-change agenda? How can community foundations serve to promote and advance the agenda?

· A multidimensional framework is developed for agenda setting, drawing on linear transformation models, layering, and collective impact to examine the contributions of community foundations to the formation of local college access agendas.

· Particular attention is paid to the horizontal alignment of partners within a community to address local challenges and …

Investigating The Roles Of Community Foundations In The Establishment And Sustainability Of Local College Access Networks In Michigan, Nathan Daun-Barnett, Haley Lamm

The Foundation Review

· Community foundations have a long history of supporting college access, particularly through the management of scholarship programs. This article examines the role of community foundations in the creation and establishment of local college access networks (LCAN) across the state of Michigan.

· We use the collective impact model as a framework to examine the roles of community foundations in the creation and development of LCANs.

· Our findings illustrate that community foundations have played a variety of roles, from fundraising to convening to cheerleading.

· The success of the community-foundation approach to LCAN development is evident both in the …