Case StUDY 1: THE EcologY of HUMAN Community

As a progressive independent school in Boulder, Colorado, the Watershed School has always centered the environment in all that it does because of its power to inspire and nurture human beings. With this clarity, the school’s recent strategic planning was focused with direction. But school leaders still face barriers: conventional ideas about education, budget concerns, and community perceptions about “private schools.”

During the Anchor Schools Leadership Launchpad, the Watershed team came to recognize the need for and power of a framework that can drive a school toward a better way of being by centering it’s external community. Especially as it navigated the questions about community that emerged while searching for a permanent location in Boulder. And as a school with a design ethos, Watershed approached these questions about community and place with curiosity and creativity.

Wanting to see some tangible changes to the school’s systems, policies, and practices, lead administrators asked Anchor Schools to work with them on the development of two toolkits, one for facilities and another for procurement. The vision for this work is the creation of processes that leverage school resources and assets for equity, well-being, and thriving in the larger community. This has also meant that the school’s curriculum, which is deeply interdisciplinary and place-based, needed to be rooted in stronger community relationships with more emphasis on equity.

As Watershed creates a new home in Boulder, the people who will inhabit it are designing and building the infrastructure that will make the school a community anchor. As they do this work, they are mindful that they must be equipped with the capacity to see outside their bubble.

Case Study 2: The Challenge of Location + Place

Starting a new school is a challenge under any circumstances. Add to this, the relocation of the campus and the launch of a new campus in a different state within the first five years of a school’s existence and the challenges are compounded.

As a micro-school, Mysa has had the ability and agility to navigate the many logistical challenges it has faced. But defining the school’s identity in relation to the larger community has been a struggle. Working with Anchor Schools, the leadership team has been able to reframe its understanding of community as a part of a new understanding of what success is for them as a school.

In Washington DC, where they held classes in a church, this meant becoming advocates for the people in the neighborhood who were struggling with homelessness. By adding their voice to community efforts to secure more resources to support their neighbors, Mysa School began a larger engagement in work that has been recognized for its impact. More importantly, it has been a meaningful learning experience for the school’s administrators, teachers, and students.

In Vermont, where Mysa recently launched a new campus, building an independent school identity within the local Mad River Valley community has meant navigating the terrain between being a threat and a potential partner for a small public school system. Here, the leadership team learned that listening was the best form of engagement that will inform guideposts as the Valley continues to grow and transition.

Moving forward, the Mysa School team has the internal capacity and insight to continue exploring its larger purpose in the community. This will be the foundation of its growth as an institution and lever for social impact.

Case Study 3: Jump-starting 100 Years of History

Having an Episcopal identity and a 100-year-old history can be clarifying elements in strategic planning. But in order for an organization to successfully implement a plan, people need to have a clear vision of their roles and the actions they must take to contribute.

As a part of its identity, St. Stephen’s + St. Agnes School (SSSAS) believes in wide community engagement, so much so that it is a key pillar in its current strategic plan. But gaining traction for the implementation of this pillar was a task in need of a jump-start at SSSAS.

Working with Anchors Schools, key SSSAS program directors were able to begin reframing existing opportunities for engagement into more meaningful community-centered experiences. They also repositioned themselves in their efforts after acknowledging they had responsibility for impact beyond simply sending students out to do the work. For one director, this meant building a deeper relationship with one of the local cultural assets they identified in their asset mapping – the Alexandria Black History Museum. For another director, it was the realization that SSSAS could help convene various community organizations to leverage their collective strength.

With renewed personal commitments to the work needed to make wider community engagement a reality at their school, the SSSAS team generated headlines they hoped to see in school publications in the future:

“Alexandria African American History Museum and SSSAS Create Learning Alliance”

“SSSAS Hosts 3rd Annual Alexandria Working Lunch”

“New Impact Metrics to Define SSSAS Operations Decision-Making”

The goal is for these headlines to serve as guideposts on the road of actions that will make SSSAS an anchor institution in the century ahead.

Case Study 4: Seeds of resilience - Youth Entrepreneurship in Rural Tajikistan

What is the central focus of a University of Central Asia (UCA) hydrology professor working in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Oblast in the high Pamir mountains of eastern Tajikistan? The landscape resilience that comes from youth entrepreneurship that is connected to knowledge of climate change.

Collaborating with UCA faculty and a local environmental NGO, Anchor Schools led a feasibility study for the CLIENT (Climate and Environment)/RESILAND CA+ initiative of the World Bank. Anchor Schools worked with 10 undergraduate students from the Earth and Environmental Sciences department at UCA to develop youth entrepreneurship programming. The goal being to increase the adoption of landscape restoration practices in rural communities across central Asia.

Using a train-the-trainer model, UCA students were introduced to design thinking and entrepreneurship and learned how to deliver workshops where youth would come together to identify, test, and launch solutions to the harmful impacts of climate change in their communities. Then, during the summer of 2021, teams traveled to 10 villages to pilot workshops and spark ideas about how to address issues caused by climate change in their communities.

These experiences inspired UCA students to create an Earth and Environmental Sciences club on campus as well as a food waste management venture. More importantly, seeds of resilience have been planted in communities across the landscape of Tajikistan and more are spreading to neighboring countries. Moving forward, Anchor Schools is collaborating with UCA and the World Bank to expand the program to Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan to build university-NGO-school ecosystems that support youth climate entrepreneurship.