Featured Projects

Community Schools Readiness Playbook -
COMING SOON
(Winter 2026)

This is an exciting project that I have been working on this year in collaboration with the Colorado Department of Education and the Rocky Mountain Family Engagement Collective.

The playbook and its tools helps leaders to understand their current readiness, identify gaps and opportunities, build stakeholder alignment, and develop a roadmap for launching or expanding a community schools initiative. The playbook emphasizes steps that can be taken that help build the shared vision, broad support and momentum needed for success.

Readiness Actions

1. Assemble (Readiness) Team

2. Learn About Community Schools

3. Data Snapshot

4. Landscape Scan

5. Consider All Stakeholders

6. Build Awareness and Readiness

7. Moving Forward!

Taking the time to build readiness helps to accelerate progress, reduce false starts, and increase support for community schools. We wrote the readiness playbook for leaders considering starting or expanding a community schools initiative. Whether you are just exploring, planning or already implementing, it is always a good time to consider readiness.

Capacity Building

COMING SOON (Fall 2026)

From 2024 to 2026, ACT Now and Community Schools Partners (CSP) co-designed and implemented a statewide capacity-building system to support 32 new community schools across 17 Illinois districts as part of leading two federal Full Service Community Schools State Scaling grant initiatives. We reflected on our experiences and developed some lessons for the field in a paper we will be releasing and presenting in late October.

Five Lessons for Statewide Capacity Building

1. Develop Community Schools Coordinators as Adaptive Leaders.

2. Invest in Training, Coaching, and Technical Assistance

3. Invest in Peer Learning Structures that Reduce Isolation and Accelerate Learning

4. Differentiate Technical Assistance and Coaching while Maintaining Strong Alignment

5. Develop the Entire School and District System

To learn more, head over to Community Schools Partners.