Scaling Community-Driven Solutions: Five Lessons in Early Learning

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By nature, community-driven solutions are unique—borne of the lived experience of community members and specific cultures, norms, and circumstances. Starting Smart and Strong is the David and Lucile Packard Foundation’s kindergarten readiness strategy to build, test, and scale up community-driven solutions. 

The Foundation is supporting three California communities—East San Jose, Fresno, and Oakland—in a ten-year effort to bring together public and private partners to determine and test approaches that address inequities in quality early childhood experiences, professional development for early educators, and kindergarten readiness. These programs have each gone through evolutions in their practices and adaptations to best support young learners, evolutions that follow five phases of scale we have documented through our long-term evaluation of this effort. The phases provide a framework to reflect on lessons and implications broadly relevant to systems change efforts that involve scaling.

1. Introduce Scale

In the first phase, communities began to conceptualize the ambitious goal of spreading effective early learning innovations. They balanced feelings of confusion and curiosity as they entered this work and sought guidance and clarity from initiative partners and the Foundation. Communities found that scaling up could take many different forms and benefitted from in-depth discussion and sensemaking sessions where they discussed what concepts and approaches resonated most within the context of their work. Through this process, each community arrived at a distinct, locally-informed understanding of scale.

💡Learning: A discovery process should be a normal, planned-for phase of long-term systems efforts working toward scale. Approaches are necessarily shaped by the people and organizations involved, as well as contextual factors. In a community-driven approach, each community needs time and support to explore how such work fits within and benefits the local context.

2. Identify What to Scale

Supporting community-led approaches to scale requires funding opportunities to pilot and test new practices that have the potential to take hold across a system. Centering local priorities means giving communities time and resources to test out solutions and strategies. The Foundation learned to walk alongside communities as they engaged in this work, encouraging them to experiment and learn from both missteps and recovery.

💡Learning: Supported by technical assistance, the testing and learning process in this phase helped communities identify potential approaches to achieve equity at scale and to gather and use data to test their strategies.

3. Engage in Deeper Conversations

As communities implemented and collected data on new early learning practices in the third phase, questions about scale became more nuanced. The Foundation worked to balance its desire for common data measures with a recognition that each community could benefit from pursuing its own inquiries. New evaluation approaches were applied that lifted up the importance of leadership, relationships, and networks for progress.

💡Learning: Data analysis (including with a self-assessment tool) drew attention to the importance of leadership and networks, which the Foundation and communities now see as essential to the scaling process.

4. Build Capacity

Communities strengthened the skills and infrastructure needed to scale effective practices across their early learning systems in the fourth phase. They developed the capacity to collect and track more advanced data, deepened their leadership and partnerships, and embraced flexibility to take advantage of both planned and emergent opportunities to expand.  

💡Learning: Scaling across an early learning system requires embedded leadership, collaborative partnerships and networks, robust data capacity, and a strong early learning infrastructure.

5. Demonstrate Resilience

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic, economic crisis, and racial justice movement tested the resilience of the Starting Smart and Strong communities and revealed whether new systems and practices could help them weather challenges. With strong partner networks, local leadership, and infrastructure, communities were able to adapt and rapidly respond to widespread challenges.

💡Learning: The disrupted normalcy in 2020 took a disproportionate toll on some groups, including families. In this radically changed context, though, the resources, connections, and tools that communities built through Starting Smart and Strong positioned them to rapidly adapt and respond.

Looking across these phases, it’s clear that scaling and spreading innovative practices across a system takes time, resources, and flexibility on the part of funders. But doing so can position communities to adapt and respond to both current and unanticipated challenges and opportunities. For more insight into lessons from this initiative, we invite you to read the full brief: