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Stories: Education

InSyte Partners led an unprecedented effort to involve parents in the shaping of a Parent Leadership Academy at a large urban school district. The school district had been turned down by funders in the past for lack of authentic community input into its design. With InSyte’s guidance, dozens of community meetings helped parents feel involved and resulted in a clear and unified vision for the Academy. The project resulted in a major foundation grant and was a first of its kind in terms of creating an authentic partnership between parents and school officials in a big-city school district. Eventually, the project attracted three times the financial investment anticipated.

In a suburban school district, InSyte facilitated several strategic initiatives that used multi-stakeholder dialogue—structured dialogue among a cross-section of stakeholders—to reach common ground for the district’s future. InSyte led a strategic planning effort to transform the program for gifted students, which is serving as a model for the state.

For three consecutive years, InSyte Partners led design and facilitation teams for SpeakUp!, a large group meeting which brought together between 500 and 1200 youth, educators, and parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds to foster meaningful conversation on issues that are critical to all three groups—issues such as drugs and alcohol, teen suicide, and eating disorders—and to develop leadership in these areas. The critical and sometimes difficult dialogue led to important changes in beliefs and in action. InSyte touched over 2000 people with this work.

For a statewide consortium of early childhood education agencies, InSyte Partners facilitated conversations that led to the adoption of new professional credentialing systems, a platform for public funding of early childhood education and unified input into the state’s system of quality control for preschools.

For a branch of a state university, InSyte guided a strategic planning effort to define its market niche and reinvigorate and align faculty and staff.  Faculty interviewed students and alumni to discern the perspective of their ultimate customer, a perspective that had gotten lost. Decision-making centered on “what not to do” as well as new initiatives to regain focus. Leaders participated in “generative listening interview” to see the big picture and narrow in on their highest leadership potential. 

InSyte recently customized a process to revitalize education and link it to employability in a small city in southeast Pennsylvania.  This city has gone through difficult times — the migration of manufacturing to other areas, conflict and divisiveness across political, geographic, religious and socio-economic boundaries, and state takeover of its public schools.  This created a tremendous void in terms of vision and hope.  Bringing together over 80 people from all sectors of the community, the group honestly addressed issues and created solutions together — something unprecedented and inspiring.  Today, nine work groups comprised of a mix of business, government and education leaders, as well as parent, students and teachers, have formed and are meeting regularly to realize the vision through action.  A blog and a video have been created to help widen the circle of engagement to all community leaders.

InSyte worked with a County Intermediate Unit around issues of partnership, organizational impact, and internal and external communication.  As part of the work, a video was created to tell the story of its past, present, future, common ground and ultimate action.  This video is at the core of a strategy  to  widen the circle of engagement both in the organization and in the community it serves.  100+ people, including students, parents, and individual school district leaders formed a "Vision Implementation Team" to realize their vision for the future.

Stories > Business | Non-Profit | Education | Health Care