CommunityShare

In 5th grade 26% of students are disengaged — by 12th grade this jumps to 66%. COVID-19 has only exacerbated this crisis. 81% of high school dropouts say relevant, real-world learning opportunities would have kept them in school. A large body of research affirms this, as real-world learning and community connections have been shown to increase student engagement and academic performance. Community connections can also expand social capital by allowing students and educators to tap a wealth of real-world expertise through a network of community professionals. Social capital is a critical predictor of health, educational attainment, academic achievement and economic success, regardless of a student’s socioeconomic background. However, access to social capital is not equitably distributed in society. Students in the bottom socioeconomic quartile have half the number of professional connections as top quartile peers. The reality is that who you know shapes your future as much as what you know.

Despite the power of social capital and real-world connections, most of the value in our communities remains a latent, untapped resource. So why are community partners and resources not more central to learning and our education system? A CommunityShare survey of 9,000 educators found that 84% of respondents want more engagement with community partners, but face three significant barriers: they don’t have time to find partners, don’t know where to look for partners and don't have training in co-designing real-world projects with partners.

CommunityShare is addressing these barriers through 1) our online platform or “human library” that matches educators and students with community partners/professionals; 2) professional development experiences that increase educator capacity to co-design real-world learning experiences with students and partners; 3) capacity building services with regional educational organizations to activate educators and community partners in their local learning ecosystems; and 4) a national community of practice of regional organizations committed to community-engaged, real-world learning.

CommunityShare’s online platform serves as a “human library” of regional wisdom and expertise, or as the Christian Science Monitor described, a “Craigslist for public education.” You can see CommunityShare in action here: https://vimeo.com/262684730

Community partners – scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, parents, and organizations – register and create online profiles to indicate the real-world experiences, skills and resources that they would like to share with educators, students and families. Educators in PK-12 schools and out-of-school learning spaces post projects and the platform automatically finds community partners whose real-world experiences match the project request, and then educators can message and schedule directly with the partner. Community partners can also post “offers” (e.g. workshops, events) on the platform that educators can search through and connect to their students. The platform serves as the connective tissue for a regional learning ecosystem. 

Community partners can engage both in-person and virtually as project collaborators, job shadow and field trip hosts, content area experts, mentors, guest speakers, and more. These engagements are as diverse as the communities we work with. Middle school teacher David Cullison wanted to give his students an opportunity to develop their carpentry skills and contribute their gifts to the broader community. David met with the local domestic violence shelter who mentioned they were looking for a dining room table set for a family. Dave connected with a local professional cabinet-maker who agreed to mentor the students to build the dining table set. The students developed a budget for the project, created design concepts and built the dining room set. They donated the set to the family at the shelter. Through this experience, the students developed critical workforce, creativity and financial skills, connected with a caring mentor, and made a difference for a local nonprofit and family. David shared, “I’ve been doing community projects throughout my career. But CommunityShare opened up a whole avenue of resources for me. I’ve been doing this for a long time, but I was an island, I was doing it on my own. Now I’m not doing it on my own - I have a whole community of people that are connected to me.” 

CommunityShare provides the platform and capacity building services to regional organizations (e.g. districts, municipalities, nonprofits). Capacity building services range from teaching how to map a community’s social capital with students to creating professional development for educators on how to co-design real-world learning experiences with students and community partners. We also facilitate a national community of practice with our regional partner organizations so that they can share lessons and resources related to community-engaged, real-world learning.

We are currently working with these regional organizations: West Clermont School District (Cincinnati, OH), Summit Public Schools (San Francisco Bay Area, CA & Seattle, WA), Hamilton County Public Schools (Chattanooga, TN), Pima County School Superintendent’s Office (Pima County, AZ), Arizona Business & Education Coalition (Yuma, AZ), and Cruces Creatives (Las Cruces, NM). We prioritize working with communities who are underserved, including low-income, rural and communities of color. For example in Pima County, students identify as 49.5% Hispanic, 36.9% White and 13.6% Other Races. Tucson is Pima County’s largest city and was ranked as having the 6th highest poverty rate among midsize cities in the U.S. Much of Pima County is rural and rural educators often tell us they feel isolated and do not have access to a diverse network of local community partners. Last year in Las Cruces, 100% of the 2228 students we served qualified for the Free & Reduced Lunch Program and 85% identified as Hispanic.

To maximize impact and equitable access to community resources, we prioritize working with regional partners that can make CommunityShare available to an entire region or at least a network of schools. For example, the Arizona Business & Education Coalition is making CommunityShare available to all schools, out-of-school programs, educators, and their students throughout rural Yuma County. This enables community professionals to be shared across a region, so if one part of the region has greater access to community professionals, those partners then become available to all regional schools. This is a way to democratize connectedness.

Since launching CommunityShare over 20,000 K-12 students have engaged with scientists, artists, business leaders, parents, academics, nonprofits, and retirees. We have documented diverse impacts from increased student engagement to greater knowledge of future career and academic pathways.

CommunityShare was founded by the community for the community. At its inception, a group of educators, students, nonprofits, and community leaders, all with deep concerns about the direction and relevance of our education system, gathered together in a living room in Tucson, Arizona. We felt that our communities - families, individual professionals, nonprofits, businesses, civic organizations – represent one of our greatest untapped assets that could play a central role in bringing relevance to learning. How could we activate the lived experiences of our local communities to support real-world learning? Could we create a human library of human books that would transform our communities into classrooms?

We have co-created solutions with educators, parents, schools, business leaders and many others to explore these questions. CommunityShare has gathered the perspectives of thousands of educators, parents, learners, and community leaders through coffee conversations, participatory action research, design thinking sessions, surveys, focus groups and other pathways. We have met with educators every month for eight years to listen and co-create CommunityShare’s vision and programmatic plans. We created an Educator Action Council to ensure educators’ voices were being heard from day one.

Since local communities are closest to the realities on the ground, we believe local leaders are critical partners in co-designing how CommunityShare can be adapted and implemented locally in ways that honor the unique cultural, economic and ecological heritage of a place. As part of this process, we work with each regional organization to develop an asset mapping process and a community engagement strategy that ensures that the community professionals recruited for the online platform reflect the overall community’s diversity. Just like ecosystems, diversity is essential for a healthy and resilient learning ecosystem. 

From a pedagogical perspective, engaging community professionals who have had similar lived experiences to students is a powerful way to not only bring relevance to an educator’s curriculum but also enable students to imagine themselves in roles they perhaps never thought were possible for someone in their circumstances. As one CommunityShare educator shared: “Our goal is to help close the representation gap for girls and Hispanic youth in science and engineering fields. By collaborating with CommunityShare mentors that reflect the students being served, many students begin to see themselves in those professions. Mentors help students develop their voice for real-world, authentic community change. As part of our professional development with educators, we encourage educators to tap into the lived experiences of their students and their community as the content. 

The CommunityShare team is representative of the communities we serve as our team includes staff who grew up in lower-income families and communities, in rural communities, and identify as BIPOC. Our Team Lead has worked with youth and educators in rural, lower-income and communities of color for the past 25 years, and he has worked and lived in three of the communities we currently serve.

As a result of the growing impact of our work, educators and educational organizations from 20+ states and six countries have expressed interest in bringing CommunityShare to their community. We are at a pivotal point as we begin the scaling process; support from Solve would play a critical role.

We are looking for a variety of areas of support. On the technical side, our regional organizational partners have provided feedback that they want to better track key data and trends so that they can make data-driven decisions in their regional ecosystems. Currently there is a basic administrative data dashboard that allows our regional partners to review relevant data, such as the number of projects, educators and community partners in their regional ecosystem. A more comprehensive tool would serve both as a data dashboard and community management toolkit. For example, the tool would highlight best practices regarding how and when to engage educators and community partners in their regional ecosystem during the initial launch of CommunityShare and over time. The tool will also enable regional organizations to identify which expertise areas are most requested by educators and determine if there are gaps in expertise areas and resources within their specific regions. In addition, we want to build an interface so that CommunityShare staff can better analyze data and insights across the entire national network, which equips us to better identify common trends and challenges and determine what types of professional learning opportunities would be most impactful. In order to address these needs, we could use technical advice in developing a more scalable community management tool, as well as assistance in finding tech talent to work with our tech team. As a nonprofit, it has been challenging to find tech talent that is open to working for “nonprofit salaries.”

We are interested in developing a CommunityShare “currency” and/or badging system that recognizes people’s contribution to their regional learning ecosystem and to our national network. We would be excited to get advice on different strategies for recognizing contribution.

Financially we have been successful in securing start-up funds to get CommunityShare off the ground and growing. We would appreciate introductions and advice to access bridge/mezzanine funding to scale our work nationally and globally. As previously mentioned, we don’t have the funding and capacity to meet the demand for CommunityShare. Currently 84% of our work is philanthropically funded and 16% of our income is earned from license/service fees. We would be interested in working with an advisor to refine our business model to grow our earned revenue in ways that do not compromise our focus on working with underserved communities. 

We are seeing increasing interest in CommunityShare in other countries and would like to make our platform and materials more linguistically accessible globally and in the diverse communities in the U.S. we serve. We would be interested in strategic and technical advice regarding the translation of our platform and work.

Nature is the mother of invention and ecological systems teach us that adaptation and diversity are central to healthy, resilient communities. COVID-19 has made it abundantly clear that education solutions must be adaptable and inclusive. We need solutions that transcend geographic, institutional, socioeconomic, and disciplinary boundaries and can adapt to changing conditions.  

CommunityShare is unique in its approach, tools and strategy. There is no efficient and equitable way for educators to find individual community partners nor a clear pathway for partners to offer their unique skills, wisdom and lived experiences across an entire school district, city or region. Currently existing platforms have a specific disciplinary focus, like STEM or the arts, which educators told us they did not want because it does not save them time jumping from platform to platform. They wanted a “one-stop shop.” CommunityShare is uniquely designed so that it can be used in schools and out-of-school settings, like libraries, Girl Scouts and juvenile justice facilities. We are less concerned about where a young person learns, and more about how we can ensure all young people have access to the resources, mentors and support to realize their potential. Nearly all existing solutions and platforms focus on the occupational/career skills that industry partners can provide. We believe those skills are important, but equally so are people’s lived experiences. We believe everyone in a community has something to offer – whether it is the grandmother who knows neighborhood history to a parent who runs a mechanic shop. Educators have repeatedly asked us if we can connect their students to adults who have shared experiences with their students, such as being the first to attend college.  

CommunityShare is systemic and sustainable in its approach. Currently most schools or youth-serving organizations have a coordinator who is responsible for building community connections. When that staff person leaves, so does their social capital. CommunityShare’s platform ensures that those partners remain accessible and visible when staff changes occur. CommunityShare works with regional partners who are committed to the health of an entire region/network versus individual institutions. As a result, when one school or organization recruits a community partner to sign up that partner then becomes available to every educator on CommunityShare, which is critical from an equity perspective.  

From 2018-2021, the Finnish nonprofit HundrED selected CommunityShare as one of the top 100 education innovations globally. Our work is catalyzing broader change nationally and globally. We were invited to present our work in Finland and subsequently Finnish education leaders contacted us for guidance and developed a countrywide model inspired by CommunityShare. We presented our work to education leaders in New Zealand, which directly informed their development of the Learning City Christchurch initiative. An educator in Uganda contacted us to explore how CommunityShare could connect girls in rural Uganda with young female professionals and college students in Kampala. These experiences suggest that CommunityShare is not only applicable and of value globally, but is activating communities to re-imagine the role of our communities in education.

Our impact goals for students are:

• Increased student engagement
• Increased social capital
• Increased understanding of future careers and academic opportunities
• Increased understanding of the real-world application of classroom content
• Increased socio-emotional skills
• Increased awareness of personal purpose and potential role in community
• Increased critical thinking, problem solving, and/or teamwork skills

Our impact goals for PK-12 educators are:

• Increased social capital
• Increased educator confidence to engage with subject matter from community partners
• Increase openness to collaboration with community partners, other educators, and students
• Increased awareness and integration of student social capital
• Increased adoption of student-centered, community-engaged learning pedagogical practices

We will accomplish these through our online platform or “human library” that matches educators and students with community partners/professionals and professional development experiences that increase educator capacity to co-design real-world learning experiences with students and partners.  

CommunityShare’s online platform serves as a human library of regional wisdom and expertise. Community partners – including scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, parents, and organizations – register and create online profiles to indicate the real-world experiences, skills and resources that they would like to share with educators, students and families. Educators in K-12 schools and “informal” out-of-school learning spaces post projects and the platform automatically finds community partners whose real-world experiences match the project request, and then educators can message and schedule directly with the partner. Community partners can also post “offers” (e.g. workshops, events, internships) on the platform that educators can search through and connect to their students. The platform serves as a marketplace and the connective tissue for a regional learning ecosystem.  

We will provide a variety of professional development experiences. Our National Educator Fellowship will be an intensive, interactive virtual experience for educators to learn how to co-design real-world learning experiences with their students and community partners. We will also pilot offering virtual workshops and events to educators and youth serving organizations within our CommunityShare network and across the country on specific topics that educators have expressed interest in, such as youth voice/agency, mapping student and educator social capital, co-designing student-driven projects with partners, etc. Additionally, we would like to pilot a personalized coaching “hotline” to educators across our national network who need assistance in planning and executing student-driven, career and community-connected learning.

Since launching CommunityShare over 20,000 K-12 students have engaged with scientists, artists, business leaders, parents, academics, nonprofits, and retirees. We have documented diverse impacts and here are a few of the outcomes our survey data has revealed:

• 96% increase in student engagement

• 96% increase in student understanding of the real-world application of content

• 90% of students built socio-emotional skills

• 88% increase in student knowledge of future career/academic opportunities

• 82% increase in opportunities to practice critical thinking, problem solving, and/or teamwork

Here is a sample of the impacts we have heard through surveys and focus groups: 

• Students who have struggled all year to complete lesson projects were engaged, creative and thinking about how to solve problems in their community through this CommunityShare project. (Educator)
  

• I now feel closer to the kids and teachers in my community. CommunityShare gives us opportunities to break down prejudices, to see each other for who we are, unique people with unique histories.” (Partner)

• We feel like a lot of people don't think middle schoolers are capable of doing great things but that's completely incorrect…we are all so proud to be a part of a project so big. (Student)
  

• CommunityShare is the bridge we have been missing between educators and the vast resources of experience and practical knowledge available in the community. It gives people like me an opportunity to invest my years of experience into the next generation of innovators, creators and leaders.  (Partner)
  

• CommunityShare opened up a whole avenue of resources for me. I’ve been doing community projects for a long time, but I was an island, I was doing it on my own. Now I’m not doing it on my own. I have a whole community of people that are connected to me.
  

• I never knew how cool glass blowing could be…I also loved learning how to write a business plan for my own studio one day.  I know what I want to do when I get older.   (Student)
  

• Students began to see themselves as problem solvers…able to look at issues in multiple ways, and were eager to bring their families in on their projects (Educator)
  

• It's difficult to express how impactful working with CommunityShare has been. It's helped me learn to better articulate my own ideas and knowledge and has increased my already enormous admiration of career educators. (Industry Partner)
  

• I changed my teaching…it has given my students access to knowledge that I wouldn’t be able to otherwise provide. Letting go of control of a lot of things has been eye opening, seeing what kids can do when you let them engage in the process. (Educator)
  

In partnership with evaluators and academic researchers, we have developed a logic model and theory of change.

CommunityShare developed an online matching platform that serves as a human library of regional wisdom and expertise, or as the Christian Science Monitor described, a “Craigslist for public education.” Community partners – including scientists, artists, entrepreneurs, parents, and organizations – register and create online profiles to indicate the real-world experiences, skills and resources that they would like to share with educators, students and families. Educators in K-12 schools and “informal” out-of-school learning spaces post projects and the

platform automatically finds community partners whose real-world experiences match the project request, and then educators can message and schedule directly with the partner. Community partners can also post “offers” (e.g. workshops, events, internships) on the platform that educators can search through and connect opportunities to their students. The platform serves as a marketplace and the connective tissue for a regional learning ecosystem. 

Community members can engage both in-person and virtually as project collaborators, job shadow and field trip hosts, content area experts, mentors, guest speakers, and more. These engagements have ranged from a landscape architect and city planner mentoring middle school students as they build 3-D models of future sustainable cities to a university marketing professor mentoring youth to price products for student-led businesses. Through meaningful engagements with community partners, students experience the real-world application of what they are learning in school, explore their career identity and career paths, connect with caring adults in their community, and imagine a future they perhaps never knew existed. 

We also built a “steward” platform with an administrative dashboard that enables our customers to communicate with and support educators and community partners, track key metrics and take data-informed action. For example, customers can track which educators have posted project ideas but have not found partners and recommend partners to them through the steward platform. Customers can track surveys sent to partners and educators after they work on a project together, which enables them to see real-time impact data. Customers can also identify data trends and community needs, for example, perhaps there are a lot of educators requesting partners in computer science and AI, but those requests are not being met. This enables customers to develop a partner recruitment strategy based on the needs of educators.

Some members of our staff have lived and worked in the communities we work in across the country. Several members of our staff and board identify as BIPOC and LBGTQ and come from lower-income families in urban and rural communities. CommunityShare believes the challenges we face as a community can only be addressed if those engaged in developing solutions reflect the diversity of our community.

CommunityShare has committed to engage communities not just as recipients of services or input providers, but as co-designers. As an example, for several years we have worked closely with educators, administrators and community leaders in Sunnyside Unified School District. There had been growing interest in CommunityShare in Sunnyside and as previously mentioned one of our Sunnyside Fellows was interested in launching and facilitating a district-wide educator Fellowship based on community-engaged learning. We met with the superintendent and director of the Sunnyside Foundation, both LatinX leaders in the community, to determine how we could co-design the fellowship to ensure it was inclusive and reflective of the Sunnyside community and the district’s goals. 93% of students in Sunnyside School District identify as BIPOC (majority Hispanic/Latino), and 83.3% of students receive free and reduced lunch. Together we decided that the fellows should reflect the racial diversity of the students and co-developed a strategy to engage BIPOC educators. The selected fellows ended up being 80% BIPOC and 20% White. The facilitators of the fellowship represent the diversity of their community. Knowing that Sunnyside is a lower-income community and that Arizona is 44th in teacher pay, we decided that each fellow should receive a $1000 stipend for their time and access to a $1000 grant for their project. In another one of our CommunityShare communities in Las Cruces, New Mexico, 100% of the 2,228 students served qualified for the Free & Reduced Program and 89% identified as BIPOC.

From a pedagogical perspective, engaging community partners who have had similar lived experiences to students is a powerful way to not only bring cultural relevance to the classroom but also enable students to imagine themselves in roles they perhaps never thought were possible. One of our educator fellows, Jackie Nichols reflected, “Our goal is to help close the representation gap for girls and Hispanic youth in science and engineering fields. By collaborating with CommunityShare mentors that reflect the students being served, many students begin to see themselves in those professions… Mentors help students develop their voice for real-world, authentic community change.” Jackie is a middle school educator and through a partnership with CommunityShare has been able to pay a stipend to some of her LatinX and indigenous alumni (now high school students) to serve as STEM mentors to her BIPOC middle school schools. This also impacts the mentors, as Pascua Yaqui student Jenavieve Echegaray reflected regarding her work with Jackie,” I’ve received recognition for my hard work from Arizona State University regarding my Future City competition project. My dream is to become a sustainability engineer and change the world.”

We have completed several BMCs, which we are happy to share. Our customers are organizations serving students and youth in schools and out-of-school spaces, which include school districts, school networks, youth-serving nonprofits, government agencies and coalitions. We provide our online matching platform, steward platform, professional development, technical support and coaching to them. The value proposition is we save them time and money by enabling educators to connect directly with community partners, which reduces the time they spend on coordination. We provide professional development opportunities so they can learn from other customers, which enables them to feel less isolated and connect with peers. The steward platform enables them to track impact and see data trends, which helps them make data-driven decisions and make their case for future funding. One of the biggest value propositions to our customers is that they can coordinate community engagement in schools at a much larger scale and more sustainably because if the coordinator of their district/organization leaves their position, the social capital does not leave, it stays in the human library. Educators get access to matching platform and partners, which saves them time from searching for partners on their own. CommunityShare provides peer-based professional development to educators, which reduces their sense of isolation and creates a sense of belonging among their peers. Students get the opportunity to connect their interests and passions with relevant projects and community partners. They also get exposed to career pathways and opportunities they would have not otherwise accessed. Students also get the opportunity to expand their social capital, which can open up internship and job opportunities in the future. Community partners get the opportunity to feel a sense of belonging, less isolated and good about making a difference in other people’s lives while also learning new things from teachers and students. Volunteering also has been shown to improve health, such as lowered blood pressure and a healthier heart.

We bring in money from grants and earned revenue. Customers pay a recurring annual membership fee to access the matching platform, white-labeled steward platform, website landing page, onboarding, technical support, coaching, and professional development opportunities for their users. The fee is based on the number of educators and socioeconomics of the community being served. We prioritize working with BIPOC, low-income and rural communities.

In addition to our philanthropic supporters, since 2020 we started to generate earned income from our customers. Some of our largest funders include the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and NewSchools Venture Fund. Our grants have ranged from $750,000 to $10,000. We currently have six customers in six states: West Clermont School District (Cincinnati, OH), Summit Public Schools (San Francisco Bay Area, CA & Seattle, WA), Hamilton County Public Schools (Chattanooga, TN), Pima County School Superintendent’s Office (Pima County, AZ), Arizona Business & Education Coalition (Yuma, AZ), and Cruces Creatives (Las Cruces, NM). This fiscal year earned revenue accounts for 16% of our total revenue, while philanthropy accounts for 84%. Based on current demand, we project increasing earned revenue to 20% next fiscal year, with the ultimate goal of reaching 50% in 5-7 years. As a nonprofit serving primarily lower-income communities, we envision philanthropy always being some portion of our revenue to ensure our product and services are affordable and equitably accessible. 

Over the next three years, we anticipate adding 3-5 new regional partners per year. In our next fiscal year (June 2034 – July 2024), we see the greatest potential with customers in Michigan, New Mexico, Kentucky, Newark, Pittsburgh, Phoenix and San Diego. In some cases, these customers are looking to implement CommunityShare citywide and statewide.