Change We Can Believe In

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Change We Can Believe In

• Rediscovering "Real Religion" for our Churches
  and our Children

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A Promised Salvation

• Come now, let us reason together, says the
  LORD. Though your sins are like scarlet, they
  shall be as white as snow though they are red as
  crimson, they shall be like wool. 
• If you are willing and obedient, you will eat
  the best from the land but if you resist and
  rebel, you will be devoured by the sword. For
  the mouth of the LORD has spoken. - Isaiah
  118-20

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What are those scarlet sins?

• Stop bringing meaningless offerings! Your
  incense is detestable to me. New Moons, Sabbaths
  and convocations, I cannot bear your evil
  assemblies.
• Your New Moon festivals and your appointed
  feasts my soul hates. They have become a burden
  to me I am weary of bearing them. 
• When you spread out your hands in prayer, I will
  hide my eyes from you even if you offer many
  prayers, I will not listen. Your hands are full
  of blood wash and make yourselves clean. ?      
  
• Take your evil deeds out of my sight! Stop doing
  wrong, learn to do right! Seek justice, encourage
  the oppressed. Defend the cause of the
  fatherless, plead the case of the widow. -
  Isaiah 113-17 

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A Second Conversion
I had to say, God, I repent, because I cant
think of the last time I thought of widows and
orphans. And so I went back and I began to
read scripture, and it was like blinders came
off. Now, Ive got three advanced degrees. Ive
had four years in Greek and Hebrew and Ive got
doctorates. And how did I miss 2,000 verses in
the Bible where it talks about the poor? How did
I miss that? I mean, I went to two different
seminaries and a Bible school how did I miss the
2,000 verses on the poor? Rick Warren
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Real Religion

• Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and
  faultless is this to look after orphans and
  widows in their distress and to keep oneself from
  being polluted by the world. - James 127
• The Message Real religion, the kind that passes
  muster before God the Father ...

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The Lord Requires ...

• He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what
  does the LORD require of you? To act justly and
  to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.
  - Micah 68

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Justice Righting Wrongs

• More than acknowledging wrongs
• More than compassion or empathy
• Justice is about righting the underlying wrongs
  that create the problem in the first place

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• It has been the risk-takers, the doers, the
  makers of things... who have carried us up the
  long, rugged path towards prosperity and
  freedom. - President Barack Obama

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Wrong Choices

• US 1 in incarceration 18 in graduation
• Avg. NYC public school graduate reads at 8th
  grade level
• Only 44 graduated in 2008
• 1.2 million students 60 do not read 70 do
  not do math at grade level

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How We Got Here

• 2006 PPSGroup Prayer BreakoutAsked What
  might happen if 7100 churches prayed for 1400
  public schools? What if we became answers to
  those prayers?
• 2007 PPSGroup Prayer BreakoutAsked How can
  we engage a plugged-in generation? What are the
  new wineskins?

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2006 - 2007

• Coalition of Urban Youth Workers champions
  adopt-a-school idea
• Redefines youth ministry and youth worker
• Our fish congregate in schools
• LPAC MNYBA invest to refine strategy
• Churches begin adopting schools for prayer,
  advocacy and service

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2008

• Launched http//2020schools.net
• PPS Introduced 20/20 Vision for Schools
• Developed 20/20 partnership with NYCLC
• Sept Launched 20/20 with 153 churches at
  conference with 1,500 leaders

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The Adoption Matrix A Strategy for Engaging
Public Schools

• The 20/20 Elements
• Vocational Calling
• School Engagement
• Student Leadership

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An Urgent Appeal to Engage a (ge)N(er)ation
At-Risk

• Sept 18, 2008
• 120 Multi-Sector Executives
• Purpose Initiate an actionable plan and model to
  help New York City school-aged youth reach their
  highest potential.

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Issue I   Collaboration

• Is collaboration across sectors (business,
  education, non-profit, government, religious,
  students, and families) for comprehensive
  education reform even possible?  If so, how so? 
  What challenges inhibit collaboration and how can
  they be overcome?

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Findings

• 1. Possible IF cross-sector stakeholders commit
  to intentional communication, trust building,
  resource sharing, and coordination of efforts,
  facilitated by catalytic and creative leaders who
  are mutually agreed and empowered by the
  stakeholders to shepherd the process on their
  collective behalf.
• 2. Challenges include defining the issues or
  mission too narrowly using exclusive language
  that fractures communities either-or engagement
  paradigms that perpetuate mistrust and
  traditional "every organization and agenda for
  itself" approaches.
• 3. Begins as each stakeholder raises awareness of
  the crisis within their respective spheres of
  influence and urges win-win approaches where each
  sector (and stakeholder) invests from its
  strengths to aid the others' weaknesses.

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Recommendations

• 1. Craft a common communications platform that
  nurtures trust among stakeholders, dispels
  suspicions, and open sources education reform by
  sharing ideas and access to resources and
  relationships identifying and innovating best
  practices decentralizing program controls to
  grassroots partners and coordinating efforts
  around a shared mission and common objectives.
• 2. Identify grassroots community institutions and
  influencers such as faith congregations,
  businesses, and non-profits to educate, equip and
  mobilize individuals to act both personally and
  collectively for education reform empower their
  success by supplying research, best practices,
  training, and scalable initiatives that can be
  decentralized and owned at the local level

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• 3. Inject accountability into reform by
  emphasizing shared ownership, including
  responsibility for the problems and opportunities
  to innovate solutions protect accountability by
  rejecting old-style blame shifting and focusing
  instead on rigorous standards, feedback, and
  evaluation. 

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Issue 2 Transcendent Strategies

• Do any specific educational issues transcend
  regional, demographic, and religious differences
  around which we can mobilize?  Which one/s?  How
  should we mobilize, and to what end/s?

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Findings

• 1. Chronic underperformance metrics nationwide
  (such as literacy, drop-out rates, college
  admission and retention, and job readiness),
  especially in urban and rural communities,
  suggest widespread institutional and individual
  failure.
• 2.  Inequitable distribution and management of
  resources financial, personnel, and otherwise
  have contributed to de facto educational
  apartheid, where the place of one's home often
  dictates the quality of education one will
  receive.
• 3. The need for systemic reform cannot trump the
  need for character education that empowers
  personal responsibility (of students, teachers,
  parents, administrators, etc), and supportive
  services that compensate for gaps in family and
  social assistance.  On the contrary, a strategy
  must integrate all three in a complementary way.

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Recommendations

• 1. Appoint a delegation of stakeholders who would
  craft a comprehensive mission, vision, values,
  and agenda for an education reform movement that
  responds to educational injustices and
  collaborative opportunities for meaningful
  change.
• 2. Overcome resource constraints by developing a
  web of partner supports that identifies existing
  (and nurtures new) womb through college
  interventions and services both regionally and at
  the grassroots level.
• 3. Build infrastructure for ongoing networking
  and coordination of efforts, resources, and
  communication that leverages technology for
  exponential reach.

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Issue 3 Leadership

• What is the role of leadership in addressing the
  educational crisis?  What kind of leadership is
  required (top-down, bottom-up, indigenous,
  expert, both/and, other)?  How do we discover,
  develop, and deploy students themselves to
  provide meaningful leadership in both conceiving
  and implementing solutions to entrenched
  problems?

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Findings

• 1. Leadership is the linchpin for comprehensive
  education reform and requires a compelling vision
  of the future the courage to pioneer new
  approaches to both collaboration and education
  the determination not to settle for anything
  short of long-term transformation the
  flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances
  and a willingness to be accountable for results. 
  
• 2. Collaborative leadership must be ethnically,
  economically, gender, and sector diverse, and
  reflect all of the above leadership styles,
  without the arrogance that suggests one style,
  demographic, or sector is inherently more
  important or valuable than the others in the
  process.

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• 3. Empowering effective student leadership
  requires changing our paradigm of students from
  customer (adults do "for" them by teaching,
  parenting, etc.) to owner (investing in their
  lives, communities, and futures by cultivating
  their own education) and releasing real
  authority to students along with corresponding
  mentorship and supervision both to make
  decisions for themselves and their schools and to
  deal with the consequences thereof, whether good,
  bad, or messy.

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Recommendations

• 1. Define stakeholder roles clearly (while
  preserving flexibility for adjusting as
  necessary), even as stakeholders empower a
  leadership team to lead this effort and align
  their personal and institutional agendas with
  that team.
• 2. Co-create among the diverse groups of leaders
  by demonstrating a willingness to meet the
  "other" on their terms, in their space, according
  to their language and customs.  Model student
  leadership development by remaining an
  ever-learning servant leader.
• 3. Identify existing and potential student
  leaders, whether formally through student groups
  and achievement records, or informally through
  personal observation and peer or teacher
  recommendations nurture student leadership
  development inside or outside schools through
  mentoring, leadership clubs, and formal training
  and create platforms for them to be heard and to
  actually lead.

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Issue 4 Synergies

• What will you bring (individually and
  organizationally) to an ongoing engagement
  strategy?  How can NYCLC help facilitate your
  continuing participation both locally and
  nationally?  What other institutions and
  individuals need to be engaged in this dialogue?

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Findings

• 1. The capacity exists for the 120 participating
  executives at the Forum to contribute
  significantly to education reform in NYC and
  beyond, both individually and on behalf of their
  organizations.  Expanding the circle to include
  others not already at the table only enhances the
  capacity for systemic and lasting change.
• 2.  Mobilizing existing networks and spheres of
  influence (employees, parishioners, friends, etc)
  requires commitments by each participant to
  educate themselves on the issues, pledge personal
  and/or institutional support, and champion the
  cause whenever and wherever possible.
• 3. The technological and media capacity exists to
  open source education reform so that every
  stakeholder can learn from the others' successes
  and challenges innovate and share solutions and
  leverage scalable impacts as a result.

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Recommendations

• 1. Process the data from the Forum thoroughly and
  timely distribute it freely to as wide an
  audience as possible and coordinate actionable
  next steps for existing and future participating
  stakeholders.
• 2. Identify from within the current participants
  names, contact information, and affiliations of
  others who need to engage the conversation and
  create onramps for them to catch-up quickly and
  contribute meaningfully.
• 3. Invite specific contributions from
  participating and future stakeholders.

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Engage The School

• One School
• Within Walking Distance
• Prayer
• Relationship
• Service
• Presence
• Policy

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About 20/20 Vision for Schools
20/20 Vision for Schools was conceived by the
Coalition of Urban Youth Workers in New York City
and operates locally as a partnership between the
Coalition and the New York City Leadership
Center. 20/20 Vision remains committed to
open-sourcing education reform. Join the
movement to transform public education
nationwide, and feel free to adapt 20/20 Vision
experiences and strategy to your city. All we ask
is that you freely give to others what you have
received from us, and let us know if and how the
strategy unfolds for you. More information
www.2020Schools.net.