The Bet We Keep Making on Local Leaders

Ask me what's happening in the cities I work with, and you'll get largely different answers for each one.

Milwaukee continues to fight for fair funding across three types of publicly funded schools that families have relied on for 30 years. Rochester, a historically underperforming system now in the early stages of transformation, is showing what the first years of City Fund's investment can look like. Kansas City is recruiting and placing community leaders into the governance seats that shape how its schools are run.

The pressures underneath those differences are changing, too. Enrollment is shifting as birth rates fall and more families choose private schools or homeschooling. AI is arriving quickly and unevenly. And the choice landscape is growing more complicated as education savings accounts spread.

None of these challenges has a one-size-fits-all solution. They require people and organizations that understand their communities, can bring others along, and are willing to stay in the work long enough to see change through.

We call them Education Champions.

City Fund's theory of action starts with a simple belief that lasting education progress is led locally. An Education Champion is a locally rooted organization, led by people who treat education as a civic priority, build real trust across the community, and have the independence to act when a system needs to change.

The story can look different from place to place, but the pattern remains consistent. Local leaders identify a challenge, build a constituency around solving it, create something that works, and use the credibility they have earned to take on the next challenge.

I believe in this model because I lived it.

Before joining City Fund, I spent six years leading strategy and community engagement at The Mind Trust. I saw what happens when a local organization spends years building relationships with district and charter leaders, families, educators, and civic leaders. This year, that helped Indianapolis move quickly when the state legislature created the Indianapolis Public Education Corporation, a new board responsible for bringing together transportation, facilities, funding, and accountability across the city's public education system.

In Milwaukee, City Forward Collective is taking on a different challenge and developing different locally-led solutions. Colleston Morgan Jr., who came up through Milwaukee schools, is leading CFC to push  for funding equity and accountability across the city's charter, parental-choice, and district schools, helping to secure roughly $400 million in new funding. CFC makes its case everywhere it can: policy briefs, Substack, weekly radio spots, and reports like its North Side education crisis brief. That combination of data and public pressure is applied across all of CFC's policy priorities, which is why elected leaders can't easily look away.

In Rochester, Dr. Shanai Lee founded READY (Rochester Education and Development for Youth) in 2023. Rochester had some of the lowest academic outcomes among New York's school districts, but Shanai did not assume she knew what the city needed. She spent two years listening to families and educators before launching the organization. Now READY is bringing new schools to Rochester.

Dr. Cokethea Hill-Woodard founded BLAQUE KC in 2020 because she believed Black and Brown students would not get the outcomes they deserve unless the community had a real voice in the decisions that govern their schools. Since 2022, it has helped place more than 50 community leaders on charter and Kansas City Public Schools boards through its Charter School Board Draft. And when Missouri moved to create a new A-F school grading system, BLAQUE KC brought educators from across the metro together to understand the policy before the state finalized it. 

These organizations don't all have the same approach. They are not solving the same problem, using the same strategy, or working in the same part of the system.

That is the point.

The people in these organizations know their cities better than anyone. They understand the local history and politics, know which doors are open, and know who needs to be at the table.  They are institutions built to be part of their cities for years, not initiatives that move on once a campaign ends.

We believe in people and organizations who can see what their city needs and stay with it when the work gets hard. Our job is to find them and back them long enough to build something that lasts.

The challenges facing public education will keep changing. Enrollment will change. Technology will change. School choice will change. Politics will change. Through all of it, the organizations that know their communities, have earned real trust, and are built to stay in the fight will keep finding solutions.