Coping Alone and Together: Big Questions on the Minds of Education Nonprofit Leaders

Table of Contents

PART A: WHAT BIG QUESTIONS ARE EDUCATION ORGANIZATION LEADERS ASKING THEMSELVES AND EACH OTHER?

• What is the smart approach to planning when there is so much uncertainty?
• How can we simultaneously respond to the urgency of the now and plan for long-term?
• How can I best support my internal staff?
• How can education nonprofits coordinate and collaborate with each other and others in the public and private sector?
• What implications does the rapid transformation of education during this crisis have for equity, access and the future of learning?
• Are students learning? How much learning are they losing? How will we know, and what can we do about it?
• How can I wade through the sea of available resources to find the ones that are high-quality and that I have time to put to use?

PART B: WHAT ARE NEXT STEPS FOR THIS GROUP?

PART A: What big questions are education organization leaders asking themselves and others? 

What is the smart approach to planning when there is so much uncertainty?

What we heard: 
Scenario planning is an essential part of the work many education nonprofit leaders are doing right now to support their staff and communities, but the volume of unknowns remains daunting and scenarios are shifting weekly. Leaders are considering how to financially sustain their organizations in 2020 and 2021 given current and anticipated funding and budget changes, while trying to plan for a variety of schooling scenarios including prolonged distance learning and virtual teacher preparation. Communicating this scenario planning to internal staff is tricky, as leaders want to be transparent and proactive without instilling fear.

Education First’s early insights: 

• Create clarity where you can, be transparent about where there are holes in your information and don’t overpromise.
• Intentionally over-communicate with your teams and create more venues to listen to their anxieties and their ideas.
• Be direct and transparent about what you’re facing as an organization, determine the principles you’ll use over and over to make decisions and then use them faithfully.
• Give your teams the right level of insight into the complicated nature of weighing myriad possibilities and the decision-making criteria you are using. Consistently come back to that. This will increase staff confidence in your leadership and allow them to focus on the critical work you need them to do.

How can we simultaneously respond to the urgency of the now and plan for long-term systems-level change?

What we heard:

Nonprofit leaders want to balance addressing pressing needs for students, families and staff with designing long-term systems change, and prioritization is top of mind as they seek to do this. Education organizations are quickly mobilizing to provide essential services to their communities like food, supplies, internet access and devices, financial support, connection to social services and more. This “triage” stage of the crisis is vital to the wellbeing of communities and deserves time and care. At the same time, nonprofit leaders want to work on innovative solutions for the future, recognizing this moment of crisis as an opportunity to rethink education and build toward deep, sustainable change.

Education First’s early insights:

• There are so many things that can require your attention as a leader during a crisis, it can be challenging to identify where to focus most of your time. One way to help you think about your role in managing through crisis is to consider your primary responsibilities—and the responsibilities you can delegate to others—across three phases:
  • 1. Respond: the initial response to the crisis while it is in motion
  • 2. Recover: the response during the time when the crisis begins to subside
  • 3. Build: the approach to building structures and systems that create new ways of more equitably meeting the needs of students, families, communities and team members in a post-crisis world
• Education First is currently developing a framework to help leaders consider their primary responsibilities across these three phases and we’ll link it here and inform our participants when it is available.

How can I best support my internal staff?

What we heard:

How can my organization create space and safety for staff? 

Nonprofit leaders note the imperative to put the mental and physical health of their staff first while balancing the need to continue working toward their mission. Leaders note that at many nonprofits, staff are members of the community served by the nonprofit’s mission; the wellbeing of all staff is integral to nonprofits’ ability to serve the community. Staff are processing loss, trauma, illness, economic hardship and instability, and organizations want to be supportive in addressing staff members’ diverse needs.

How can we build and maintain a strong culture? 

In an effort to build and maintain a strong organizational culture amid significant changes to work and life, leaders are trying out new approaches. These include setting aside time for virtual culture-building activities, providing employees flexibility in working hours and time off to address their different schedules and needs, and increased frequency and transparency in communication to the full staff and individuals through messages, meetings, office hours and “town halls.” While these efforts can go a long way in building a strong virtual work culture amidst crisis, leaders also note the tough financial realities and pressures that are forcing their organizations into layoffs, reducing work hours, restructuring teams and reducing benefits, which has contributed to staff stress, fear and low morale that are difficult to navigate.

How can we support staff to develop new skills and uncover innovative approaches to their work?

Education organizations are ideating, prototyping and implementing solutions on faster design cycles than usual and many employees are taking on new tasks and roles, creating a need to upskill staff and rethink project and team management. Leaders are seeking to equip their employees with the adult learning experiences needed to build skills to thrive now and in a future that will likely require hybrid and virtual work addressing novel problems internally and in the education field. Some leaders are trying new project and team management processes and tools, offering virtual professional learning opportunities, and adopting or leaning into

design thinking at their organization.

Education First’s early insights:

• Continue to communicate with transparency, listen, observe and empathize to support staff; help staff to see how the content of their work and their approach to work must change; and be prepared to upskill staff to work in these new, flexible collaborative ways.
• Gather your leadership team and managers could gather to develop and lean into strong change management competencies.
• Look at what big initiatives you thought you were going to accomplish in 2020 and 2021 and then cut to right-size your expectations under these new conditions. Committing to fewer priorities should reduce the stress on leaders and already taxed organizational resources.
• Cut any standing meetings or responsibilities that are not critical. Steps you can take to reduce staff burden signal to them that their health and wellbeing are paramount. 
• When you do gather your teams, engage them in ways that will help you build the culture you want for your organization. Make time for them to share, listen and support one another. Include them in solutions-finding that will build a sense of shared ownership for your organization’s success.

How can education nonprofits coordinate and collaborate with each other and others in the public and private sector?

What we heard:

Now more than ever, nonprofit leaders feel that coordination and collaboration with other organizations are vital to supporting students and communities instead of working in silos. Leaders see an enormous amount of hard work occurring in response to this crisis but a lack of coordination, leading to worries that siloed organizations are reinventing the wheel rather than building on each other’s valuable expertise and capacity. From a nonprofit budget perspective, some leaders suggest building alliances and sharing infrastructure costs among nonprofits to mitigate financial strains. Others suggest strengthening networks of nonprofits that connect leaders across cities and states to strategize and learn from one another. Within communities, leaders want to see different types of nonprofit, public and private sector organizations work together to serve those in need, for example coordinated initiatives between hospitals and schools.

Education First’s early insights: 

• Don’t assume staff who are not used to working collaboratively will know how to do so without support, especially given the new virtual work world. Expect that staff will need training and clarity about these new expectations to do this well.
• Continue to seek each other out. Nonprofit leaders expressed that it is simply important to have a space to talk to each other about their challenges and hopes, making this experience feel a little less lonely.
• Stay tuned for Education First’s upcoming publication that will outline the work ahead for school systems, to be released in the coming week and include an emphasis on collaboration.

What implications does the rapid transformation of education during this crisis have for equity, access and the future of learning?

What we heard:

Nonprofit leaders find that this crisis has made existing educational inequities more visible and threatens to widen gaps in educational opportunity. The students who will be most impacted by this crisis are the same students who are already most vulnerable in the education system: students in poverty, students experiencing homelessness, English Language Learners, students of color and students with special needs. Distance learning presents enormous equity challenges related to internet access, device access, social and emotional learning, intervention and special education, among others. Nonprofits are working hard to mitigate learning loss and address students’ academic and social and emotional needs, and believe equity to be an absolutely central part of responding to this crisis and rebuilding U.S. education.

Education First’s early insights: 

• One of our participants asked: “What are the top five most pressing equity issues that we think will emerge in the next six months without intervention? What policies and support must be put in place to prevent the equity gap from widening?” If this big question is directly related to the work you do as an organization, you might consider asking a subset of your staff to work together to create the list of five, and beginning to consider a plan for how to address them organizationally and as a field.

Are students learning? How much learning are they losing? How will we know, and what can we do about it?

What we heard:

Leaders anticipate that students will experience significant learning loss—the most vulnerable students being impacted most—and that teacher preparation and ongoing professional development may struggle to achieve the efficacy needed to equip teachers with the knowledge, skills and support they need to thrive in their profession. With no clear direction on what to expect for the format or timing of schooling, professional learning  or assessment going forward, nonprofit leaders are considering how to support students, families, educators and school systems both while schools are closed and when they partially or fully re-open. Distance and hybrid learning for students and teachers, curriculum changes, and alternative forms of assessment are topics of interest among education leaders seeking to better understand how to effectively teach, learn, and measure learning in light of the sweeping changes to education caused by the pandemic.

Education First’s early insights:  

• We at Education First have a lot to say about this. We’re in the process of writing a blog post on diagnostic assessment and a publication that will outline the work ahead for school systems, touching on this big question nonprofit leaders asked. We expect both pieces to be out in the next week and will link them here and inform our participants when they are available.

How can I wade through the sea of available resources to find the ones that are high-quality and that I have time to put to use?

What we heard:

Leaders are interested in high-quality resources to support their organizations, students and families, but the volume and lack of organization of resources can be overwhelming. They note that a more curated list would be valuable, and highlight key topics where they are seeking resources, including: equitable design of organizational processes, strategic planning, professional learning, decisionmaking in uncertain times, scenario planning, a space where teachers share their voices, and teacher hiring and preparation, among others.

How we’re responding:

• We hear you. We will keep the barrier to entry for our calls low and aim to get participants a small set of curated, high-quality resources as follow-up to our calls.
• So as not to add to the overwhelm, throughout this summary we included only the links that we feel are most relevant to your big questions. 
• We want to thank our participants who shared a wealth of resources during and after the conversations. We created a full database of participant-supplied resources: please reach out to aperkins@education-first.com if you wish to access it.

PART B: What are the next steps for this group? 

We knew that if we listened closely for unmet needs, these open-format conversations would provide us with direction for where the conversation might go next. The early insights above provide several options for the content of the next conversations. 

We’re also left with several options for the format of future calls and ways to differentiate the content to meet participant needs. After the call, we asked participants to share what would be most valuable for them as we plan for a continued series of conversations. We see three participant profiles (though they are not mutually exclusive) emerging:  

• Keep it loose and focused on community: Participants who prefer to keep the conversations organic and lightly structured, focused mainly on creating space for connection. 

• Whole-group learning with time to apply: Participants who prefer to learn new content (e.g., a framework for organizing work along phases of the crisis and delegating roles) in the whole group and then break into small (perhaps role-alike) groups to apply. 
• Collective action: Participants who would like to identify one or two topics to collectively pursue action around. We envision participants self-selecting into a topic, specific issue area or policy question and then collaborating to pursue action on it. 

Education First will continue to convene this cohort of nonprofit leaders, differentiating the experience to reflect these three participant profiles, and adjusting both content and format to serve the nature of the work they take on. As the cohort progresses, we will share what we learn and what we produce here.

Summary and recommendations authored by Amanda Perkins, Meg Ramey, Erika Hesterberg and Rashidah Lopez Morgan