Our nation’s educations and workforce systems—intended to be engines of opportunity—must continuously address the impact of systematic racial, gender and economic disparities and need strategies to remove barriers to success for underserved students and workers. We work with organizations whose mission is to address systemic racism and close gaps in opportunity and performance to benefit underserved communities. We do this by drawing attention to research that exposes inequities, making the case for more equitable approaches, and building support and documenting effecting changes in policy and practice.

For the past two years, we have led the communications effort for Data for American Dream (D4AD) initiative that helps low-income, un- and under-employed workers in Colorado, Michigan, and New Jersey get timely, personalized, and accurate job information. D4AD helps vulnerable workers, jobseekers, and students put this information to use to find job training and employment opportunities that put them on career pathways that lead to higher wages and improved economic prospects. Our role has been to develop messaging; synthesize research, conduct opinion research and write reports on how best to reach unemployed, underemployed, and low-income workers; and develop tools and materials to help participating states communicate about the initiative.

For four years, we led communications efforts for Achieving the Dream’s Working Students Success Network, a $12-million, 19-campus effort to help community college students gain a secure financial foothold while completing credentials and degrees. The effort was one of the largest to provide comprehensive services to working students to address their academic and nonacademic needs and make substantive changes in how institutions work and what they do to address them. Our efforts included naming, messaging, storytelling, documenting progress, identifying lessons from research across the program, and writing case studies and guidebooks drawn from the work across institutions. We also worked with ATD to strategically align this work with other organizational efforts to develop a new service line providing colleges with assistance in introducing Holistic Student Supports.

Since 2018, we have worked with Crescendo Education to build support and expand its Equitable Grading Project, which works with dozens of public and independent schools, school districts, and charter school networks to ensure that grades and grading are a fair, objective, and accurately reflect standards-based student academic performance. Our work has included a broad range of strategic communications efforts that has helped founder Joe Feldman raise visibility for and expand the network through meetings with influencers; writing policy papers, opinion pieces and articles; and supporting fundraising and marketing efforts.