The Dot Connector

by Jana Riess

In the dilapidated gym at Hoffman-Parham Elementary School in Cincinnati, third-graders swirl and dance, giggle and sway, moving in time to the “Blue Danube Waltz” blaring from a CD player. They are proud to show off for their parents and fellow students, yet slightly awed by their instructor, a dancer from the Cincinnati Ballet.

But this isn’t just a ballet performance. It’s also a lesson in geography and language arts. The dance has been choreographed to help the students not only appreciate ballet but also hit key benchmarks in the all-important Ohio Achievement Test, given to students throughout the state each spring. As the kids glide across the room, they show how the Danube flows from west to east. When they touch the 10 hula hoops scattered about the gym, they depict how the Danube flows through or along 10 different European nations. When the dancers gleefully collide into the far wall, they are the Danube, emptying into the Black Sea.

At a time when school districts nationwide are cutting budgets, it’s no longer a given that music, art and dance are essential to a child’s education. In Cincinnati, however, arts advocates and educators are working together to make sure the arts remain a vital part of children’s lives, helping them to excel academically.

The catalyst that’s bringing them together is Strive, a new kind of nonprofit that creates collaborative partnerships among others, in this case to improve education for children in Cincinnati. Founded in 2006, Strive is an upstart that is changing the way nonprofits operate and view themselves. It is at once a facilitator, a convener, a support system and an über-nonprofit. It may even be the future of nonprofits.

“We’re the dot connectors, bringing people together for systemic change,” said Geoff Zimmerman, Strive’s director of continuous improvement. “We’re a nonprofit that helps improve the systems that need to change for education to improve.”

The flowing dance of the Danube is a perfect example of how Strive works. For years, people in Cincinnati’s arts community, working through the Fine Arts Fund -- an 83-year-old nonprofit that supports arts throughout the region -- planned and implemented programming in the city’s schools. But they didn’t always know what local educators wanted and needed.

‘Who are our customers?’

Strive encouraged them to think about their task differently, more like a business would, using a “continuous improvement process.” First, they needed to ask themselves, “Who are our customers?” The answer changed their whole approach to programming for the schools.

“They realized that students are their customers, yes, but also teachers and schools,” said Debbie Curl-Nagy, Strive’s associate director of systems innovation. “And what’s important to those customers is that they get good ratings on tests in math and reading.”

As a result, the city’s arts organizations started figuring out how their programs could better meet their customers’ needs. They designed programs that could help the schools achieve their desired outcomes, and it’s working, Curl-Nagy said.

The arts network is just one of 15 areas where Strive is working to improve education “from cradle to career” (as the organization’s tagline puts it) for young people in greater Cincinnati. The organization was launched after extended community discussion about how to improve local schools’ performance on several educational benchmarks, from the percentage of five-year-olds ready to start kindergarten to the percentage of high school graduates going on to college.

The fledgling nonprofit recruited a “who’s-who” list of prominent Cincinnatians to serve on its board of directors. With that and generous funding from the KnowledgeWorks Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Strive set out to create partnerships to enhance education throughout the region -- not only in Cincinnati but also across the Ohio River in Covington and Newport, Ky.

After only a few years, the program has seen impressive results. The high school graduation rate in Cincinnati’s urban core -- 72 percent in 2004 -- jumped to 82 percent by 2008. Kindergarten-readiness rates, while still low, have moved up four points to 48 percent since 2006. And that’s just the beginning.

Crunching numbers, sharing data

Strive’s goal -- to help ensure children’s success from birth through college and beyond -- is remarkably ambitious. But with the help of some of Cincinnati’s most visible corporations, Strive has a detailed action plan to make it happen. Procter & Gamble loaned the nonprofit a staff member, while Toyota and GE provided systems thinkers who could explain how they use continuous improvement processes in their work.

“We wanted to know how we could apply those same principles to education,” said Jennifer Blatz, Strive’s director of operations.

Those conversations led Strive to adapt GE’s “Six Sigma” program for use in the social sector. Basically, Six Sigma is a business management strategy aimed at maximizing results. The process outlines a series of crucial steps such as defining a team, creating a charter and developing a plan to measure success or failure systematically, based on data.

GE developed its version of Six Sigma to encourage collaboration among internal departments, which is difficult enough. Strive’s challenge may be even greater: It’s using Six Sigma across a broad spectrum of organizations such as schools, local governments, businesses and philanthropies, each with its own way of collecting and measuring data.

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