Building a unified vision, voice, and team to scale cradle-to-career services across Spartanburg County
Challenge
In 2023, after over twenty years of relatively quiet, behind-the-scenes work to collect data and convene partners to improve education outcomes in Spartanburg County, Spartanburg Academic Movement received a major $75M gift from Blue Meridian to scale its work across the community through a highly integrated model of cradle-to-career services. This gift built on SAM's partnership with STRIVE Together and Purpose Built Communities, and it turned out to be just the beginning of a series of philanthropic investments and major grants that totaled over $200M.
SAM had the model, the money, the community trust, and the leadership in place. What it needed to develop was a unifying vision and voice that made sense of the complex roles SAM played in the community and the range of partnerships and programs it facilitated. SAM also needed to quicky grow the team and the internal infrastructure to operate with fidelity at a much larger scale
Solution
Beginning in 2024, Openfields worked closely with the leadership team at Spartanburg Academic Movement to help:
- Define a long-term vision for the role SAM will play in Spartanburg and the wider field of place-based philanthropy
- Facilitate the annual strategic planning process (2024, 2025, 2026) through a series of team workshops and retreats
- Provide individual and group coaching for the existing and new cohort of Directors
- Train the growing team - most of which came from direct-service agencies - on the meaning, and possibilities, of serving as an intermediary organization
- Develop tools and processes for managing integrated workflows across a full-range of cradle-to-career programs
Openfields integrated, collaborative model of planning, facilitation, and team building was particularly effective at building shared ownership across SAM through a season of rapid growth and change. Openfields also initiated a range of creative perspectives on the role SAM (and other place-based intermediaries) plays not simply as an integrator of social services, but as a civic institution, increasing community members' sense of belonging and agency as they participate in building the future of Spartanburg.
Read more about SAM at Strive Together's site: Empowering Economic Mobility Through Postsecondary Success
Our work with Openfields has helped us see the limits in our own thinking and begin to generate ideas and alternatives to challenge and transform the status quo.
Dr. Jackie Counts
Director of the Center for Public Partnerships & Research at the University of Kansas
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