Four Principles for Building our Next Chapter
Thirty-five years ago, Making Waves made a promise to young people in Richmond – we promised to expand educational opportunity, so they could pursue their dreams. We’ve made tremendous headway, with over 70% of our students enrolling in a 4-year college and over 70% graduating with debt-free bachelor’s degrees, nearly double the national average.
We’ve excelled at supporting students from 5th grade through college graduation, but in today’s landscape a degree alone no longer guarantees economic mobility.
- Career under-matching: Half of employed college graduates work in roles that don’t require their degree, and only half of young adults in their early 20s hold “strong early jobs” with paths to family-sustaining wages.
- The career preparation gap: Educational attainment and work experience are the biggest predictors of economic mobility, yet schools rarely prepare students with career-connected learning or the durable skills like creativity, collaboration, and complex problem-solving that employers increasingly demand.
- Lack of coordination between K-12, higher ed, and employers: Building career pathways at scale requires coordination among high schools, higher education, and employers; however, regions often lack an organization focused on orchestrating those pathways.
While we’re up against some serious challenges, I’m excited to reimagine what’s possible in expanding educational opportunity AND expanding career opportunity for our students.
I’m leading a strategic planning process to shape Making Waves’ next chapter alongside Alton Nelson, CEO of Making Waves Academy. To deliver on real change, we’re leading with four key principles:
1. Strengthen our existing program while we build a new one
Organizations must balance delivering their core program while simultaneously investing in innovation to seize new opportunities, solve challenges, and adapt to changing landscapes. It’s a balancing act, and we’ve learned helpful lessons by adopting the Engine 1 & Engine 2 framework:
- Keep Engine 1 running strong. 90% of our team focuses on Engine 1 – our core program, supporting thousands of students on their college journey. Asking our team to wear two hats to simultaneously manage core programming and innovation would risk both student support and staff burnout.
- Leverage external expertise. Our senior leadership team dedicates time to Engine 2 while we bring in fractional staff and external experts to build innovation capacity.
- Invest financial resources in Engine 2. We’ve committed 10% of our budget to Engine 2, ensuring we have the resources to experiment and try new things.
2. Understand the problem
We wanted to build a deep understanding of the education and workforce landscape to get clear on the problem we’re trying to solve. For the first five months of our process, our leadership teams at Making Waves Education Foundation and Making Waves Academy have been doing that together:
- Interviewing Making Waves students and alumni to understand their Making Waves and life experiences. They’ve shared such important insights – they want guidance for building social capital, they want to accelerate their path to a degree through dual enrollment, and they want to minimize college debt and also learn best practices for building wealth.
- Exploring research like Jobs for the Future’s The Big Blur, Charter School Growth Fund’s and Bain’s Early Career Outcomes Study, and Learner Studio’s Building the Future of Learning. Our takeaways: we need to build career-connected learning into schools and bring together K-12, higher education, and employers to position young people to secure high-demand, high-wage careers.
- Visiting innovative models like The Opportunity Trust, Da Vinci Schools, Sturm Collaboration Campus, and Cherry Creek Innovation Campus. I’m excited to see stakeholders within regions – high schools, major employers, colleges, intermediary organizations, and funders – working together to build career pathways that position young people to secure high-quality jobs they’re excited about, and in turn, building a talented regional workforce.
3. Build a coalition for change
I love John P. Kotter’s Leading Change: Why Transformation Efforts Fail.The first reason transformation efforts fail – “not establishing a great enough sense of urgency.”
The stakes are clear: while 71% of our students earn a bachelor’s degree, only 50% secure strong first jobs. And students who start but don’t complete their degree face even steeper challenges to economic mobility.
If we’re about economic mobility, we must evolve our model.
When we introduced the strategic planning process to our teams and boards, we focused on one goal: build conviction about the need to change. Kotter says the urgency rate is high enough when “75% of a company’s management is honestly convinced that business as usual is totally unacceptable.”
To get to 75%, we built our coalition. We didn’t rush this step. Working with our partner Rob Strain from Lemon Battery, we spent time with our teams and our boards examining the landscape and the stakes for young people.
This approach paid off – we’ve built clarity, conviction, and urgency needed to act and now rally partners to join us.
4. Start small, test, then build
Instead of taking a traditional strategic planning approach – getting in a room, mapping out goals and strategies, and launching – Alton and I wanted to pilot new ideas in real-time.
Because, if we’re truly evolving and doing new things, we need to test ideas, see what works, what doesn’t, and what new insights emerge.
Our first pilot, Hands-on-Health: Paid Career Exploration Fellowship, tests how we can start to create a scalable work-based learning model for Contra Costa County. It’s a three-day immersive healthcare program in partnership with Kaiser Permanente School of Allied Health Sciences. In the fellowship, high school students in Richmond will gain work-based learning experience, develop durable skills, and build social capital (and getting paid thanks to YouthWORKS!).
Interested in learning more?
We are deep in this strategic planning process with much to test and learn. One thing is clear: We can’t open doors to economic mobility alone.
I’m energized about new ideas, pilots, and engaging differently with young people, school leaders, higher education institutions, employers, and funders. If you’re interested in learning more or partnering on our next pilot to position young people for economic mobility and fulfilling lives, let’s connect!
Let’s partner!
At Making Waves, we know corporate and community partnerships are a win-win.
Together we can support historically underrepresented students in developing their career skills and we can build a more diverse workforce – all while boosting your organization’s brand awareness and employee engagement.
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