America’s Promise Alliance on Collective Action and Field Building

On this episode of the Getting Smart Podcast, Mason Pashia is joined by two individuals from America’s Promise Alliance (APA), an organization that weaves people and organizations together for a positive impact. Mike O’Brien, CEO of America’s Promise Alliance, and Parvathi (Parv) Santhosh -Kumar their VP of Community Impact.

Together, they talk about the importance of field building, how uniquely bi-partisan and longstanding organizations like APA can drive change through radical collaboration, what they learned from a 180-organization listening tour across the U.S. and much more. 

Links:

• America’s Promise Alliance
• Parvathi Santhosh-Kumar LinkedIn
• Mike O’Brien LinkedIn
• Baratunde with Jon Alexander
• Kim Smith on Getting Smart Podcast

Transcript

Mason Pashia: You’re listening to the Getting Smart podcast. I’m Mason Pashia. We are in a time of radical uncertainty but also radical opportunity, with both global and national challenges spreading wider and faster than ever before. Often, the only way forward is together. But how do we, as a smattering of organizations and individuals, move together collectively? How does leadership adapt when confronted with challenges that only collective imagination and action can solve? Today, I’m joined by two individuals from America’s Promise Alliance, an organization that weaves people and organizations together for a positive impact: Mike O’Brien, CEO of America’s Promise Alliance, and  Parvathi Santhosh -Kumarathi , their VP of Community Impact. Welcome, it’s so good to have you here. Thanks.

Mike O’Brien: Great to be here.

Parvathi Santhosh -Kumar:And thanks for having us.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, yeah, of course. Well Mike, would you mind giving me the origin story of APA?

Mike O’Brien: Yeah, America’s Promise Alliance was founded more than twenty-five years ago. It was the genesis of an unlikely alliance that included the five living presidents at the time. The idea was that there should be a more coordinated, aligned, organized national effort to make sure the next generation of young people had what they needed to thrive and to lead. It was initially a convening. Those five presidents held the summit in 1997 in Philadelphia. They recruited Colin Powell to be the first person to run the organization. People came to that summit: governors, mayors, corporate leaders, nonprofit leaders, and made commitments on ways they could tangibly improve the lives of young people in their community, and sort of went home and did them. Out of that initial summit emerged a five-promise framework that was about the five fundamental promises that should be true for all young people in this country. Over twenty-five years, the organization kept finding different ways to manifest that original vision that aligned with the needs and dynamics of the country as we evolved in this work.

Mason Pashia: I love it. How did you find your way there?

Mike O’Brien: I started my career way back when as a high school teacher in Brooklyn, New York City. Through that experience, I got really fascinated by the role that relationships played inside of schools and in education and wanted to work on that. That led me to spend seventeen years working at an organization called iMentor, which helped first-generation college students on the path to postsecondary success. Seventeen years of running and scaling a single direct service organization helped me get a deep appreciation for the collective wisdom and power that lived across so many incredible organizations and leaders. But I also saw the way that didn’t actually move around the field very effectively. The opportunity to work on that challenge at a time when it feels like so much is up for grabs in our work and in our country was really inspiring to me.

Mason Pashia: Awesome. And Parv, how about you? How did you find your way to America’s Promise Alliance?

Parvathi Santhosh -Kumar: I grew up moving around every few years as a kid and was always curious about why places shape who we are and who we become. I was really just hungry to shape the architecture of how systems and supports work for young people. I’m about a year into my tenure at APA and really energized about the power of unleashing the potential of leading youth-supporting organizations across the country. How can we all come together to both improve our own organizations at scale and then work differently together to pursue real change that can improve outcomes for every next generation?

Mason Pashia: Amazing. On that subject, in 2021 you all went on this one hundred and eighty-day tour, or one hundred and eighty-eight organization listening tour, to glean insights from a bunch of different communities. I’m curious what you learned as you were conducting this research about regional initiatives and how those stack together to form the bigger picture, for example.

Mike O’Brien: In 2021, we set out to find a modern manifestation of this original vision of what a more aligned and organized effort on behalf of the next generation might look like. Obviously, it was a fascinating time to be doing that when the leaders, organizations, and communities were faced with so many intersecting challenges. We went out and talked to the organizations that were on the front lines of doing that work. We really set out to learn two different things: one, we wanted to understand how people were experiencing the dynamics of the moment. What was the stuff they most valued, wanted, and needed? Second, we wanted to learn about people’s experiences in other collective impact spaces and if and when they fulfilled their potential and why they might have fallen short of that potential. The very short summary of that very long listening tour is, in terms of dynamics at the moment and at a more human level, it’s just a time when leaders were faced with more urgent, complex, and fluent questions than they had ever faced before. There was a way deeper-than-normal desire to see outside of the four walls of your own organization and to see how other leaders and other organizations were wrestling with similar challenges. That led us to this reimagining of the alliance in America’s Promise Alliance and the launch of this new practitioners’ community as the centerpiece of what we would try to do in the future. Can we build the leading practitioners’ community for organizations working in K-12 education, postsecondary to workforce pathways, and civic engagement and democracy?

Mason Pashia: What does that look like today? You were talking about this platform, this practitioner-sharing platform. You’ve got a lot within your resources about this idea of field building to help people come together. Question for either of you, but paint me a picture of where that is today. What are the tools and the mechanisms that keep that going?

Mike O’Brien: The things we heard most from folks on the listening tour that led to the community we ended up designing were a combination of, typically, only the CEOs of these organizations get invited to all these collective impact tables. That is not only a bottleneck for all the learning, sharing, and collaboration that can take place among organizations, but it also means we’re not investing in that broader bench of leaders. In our community, it’s the full executive teams of our member organizations. We heard feedback that typically, philanthropy is the primary convener and field builder in this space. No matter how much people loved and appreciated their funders, there just wasn’t enough candor in those conversations for people to bring the stuff they were truly most struggling with. Folks wanted this independent, bias-free, practitioners’ community. The third thing we heard is that young people’s lived experiences are at the intersection of multiple issue areas, but too often in the field, we organize in smaller silos: just the K-12 people talking to the K-12 people or the workforce people talking to the workforce people. Folks wanted a broader set of organizations that encompassed those intersecting issue areas. The last one was, in a lot of these collective impact spaces people had been in previously, people felt like they were always chasing this shiny new thing and it never really centered their day job, their priorities, and what they were trying to get done this year. People were saying that, on the merits, we miss organizational improvement as this massive lever for improving outcomes by chasing the shiny new thing. But on a more human level, folks were just saying, I want to start being a part of a community that helps me with the most important stuff I’m trying to get done. If we do that by bringing me into an authentic community with other leaders and other organizations, we can build trust, relationships, and the habits of working together, which is actually a more durable foundation for the collective action and policy and practice change work that people still wanted to be inside the same community. This hybrid community that combines organizational improvement with collective action and systems change work was born from the listening and learning we did on that initial tour.

Mason Pashia: I love it. Parv, does this look like a platform for engagement? Is this primarily a system of convenings? How do people actually connect now that you have done some of this work of sourcing that feedback?

Parvathi Santhosh -Kumar:To paint a picture of what alliance members look like in the community, we’re bringing together the leading youth-supporting organizations across the country, across these issue areas: K-12, postsecondary workforce pathways, civic engagement, and democracy. We’ve got five senior leaders from each of these organizations opting into our spaces and alliance programming. Just this year alone, we’ve stewarded over 200 unique alliance community spaces. These are primarily virtual Zoom rooms and spaces where we’re bringing together leaders. They really range: you can have these intimate leadership cohorts where groups of eight to ten leaders in similar roles and similar-sized organizations are coming together for three hours every month for a twenty-four-month commitment. They’re showing up for three hours a month, every month, with the same group of leaders, pouring their souls out with one another and getting that community and support, that home team. That’s one type of engagement. We’ve got these intensive capacity-building programs where people are really meeting the moment of the most emerging needs in the sector, not just working on theories and frameworks but really driving towards tangible implementation of the practical action plans they need to improve their day-to-day work. Then we’ve got these really candid community collaborations where people are coming together for the responsive topics. What’s keeping leaders up at night? What are the conversations people need to be having? What do you need to be able to listen and hear from other leaders across the sector to see inside the four walls of another organization, to feel less lonely in your work, to get support, to get ideas, to drive action that ultimately increases how your organization does its work better, and also seeds powerful ideas across organizations?

Mason Pashia: It’s a beautiful image of a bunch of leaders being okay with saying, “I don’t know,” which is an incredibly different approach to problems than we’ve

 traditionally had in this field.

Parvathi Santhosh -Kumar: Absolutely. Just to that point, we really see ourselves as stewards of space. It’s less about bringing in thought leaders, academics, researchers, and practitioners from outside our community, and more about getting out of the way to let folks hear from one another, to be in space with one another, to listen to one another, and to really practice this honesty and openness that people crave. We’re providing as much structure and guidance for the space to be stewards of the conversation, but we’re really trying to get out of the way so people can be together and learn from one another.

Mason Pashia: How are you capturing, organizing, and amplifying the knowledge generated in those rooms? One of the worst things that can happen in the world is these powerful conversations happen and then they dissipate, right? How are you capturing them?

Parvathi Santhosh -Kumar: We’ve spent a lot of time building the structure and the scaffolding to keep this community vibrant. It looks like investing in our own tech stack to make sure that we’re following up, sending the meeting recaps, sharing those reflections, pulling those insights, coding those insights, and sharing them back with the community. It’s also investing in our own internal knowledge management structures. We want to be agile in how we can respond to what we’re hearing and bring those emergent needs back into our own programming. This is the core of our work. All of this listening, sharing, reflecting, organizing, and bringing back into practice is the primary way we show up for our community and make sure that it’s really our north star. We’re following the lead of what we hear and making sure we’re meeting the moment to support our organizations and their leaders in a real, tangible, and practical way.

Mason Pashia: What has emerged from this community? Any stories that stand out about the impact it’s had so far? 

Parvathi Santhosh -Kumar: There’s a lot of deep impact. We’ve seen organizations transform their practices, deepen their relationships, and even come together to tackle new projects collaboratively. For example, some members have gone on to co-author policy recommendations that have influenced legislation. Others have developed joint funding proposals that leverage the strengths of each organization, leading to more robust programming and outreach. We’re starting to see the collective impact we envisioned, with tangible benefits for the young people and communities we all aim to serve.

Mike O’Brien: Another thing I would add is that we’re really seeing a cultural shift in how leaders in our field are showing up for one another. There’s a new willingness to be vulnerable and to say, “I don’t have all the answers, but I’m here to learn.” This has led to a much more open and honest dialogue about the challenges we’re facing and the innovative solutions we’re exploring. For instance, during our monthly leadership cohort meetings, we’ve had leaders share real-time struggles they’re experiencing, from organizational culture issues to challenges with funder relationships, and they’ve received immediate, actionable feedback from their peers.

Mason Pashia: That’s really powerful. It sounds like you’ve created a space where leaders can truly support each other and grow together, which is essential for driving systemic change.

Parvathi Santhosh -Kumar: Exactly. And this sense of community and mutual support has been incredibly energizing for everyone involved. It’s not just about the professional development and organizational improvement, although those are important; it’s also about fostering a sense of belonging and purpose among the leaders who are doing this critical work. That’s something we’re really proud of.

Mason Pashia: I can see why. So, looking forward, what’s next for America’s Promise Alliance? What are your goals for the future?

Mike O’Brien: We’re really focused on scaling this community and deepening the impact of our work. That means continuing to listen to our members, refining our programming based on their feedback, and finding new ways to support them. We’re also looking to expand our reach and bring more organizations into the fold, particularly those that are doing innovative work in their local communities but may not yet be connected to a broader network. Ultimately, our goal is to create a more aligned, powerful, and effective field that can drive significant, sustainable improvements in the lives of young people across the country.

Parvathi Santhosh -Kumar: We’re also committed to continuing to elevate the voices and experiences of young people themselves. They’re at the heart of everything we do, and we believe they should be at the center of the conversations and decisions that affect their lives. So, we’re exploring new ways to engage young people directly in our work and ensure their perspectives are heard and valued.

Mason Pashia: That’s fantastic. Thank you both so much for sharing your insights and for the important work you’re doing. I’m excited to see where America’s Promise Alliance goes from here.

Mike O’Brien: Thanks for having us.
Parvathi Santhosh -Kumar: Thank you, it was a pleasure.