The Client

The Greater New Orleans Foundation (GNOF) has served for over 100 years, driving positive impact through philanthropy, leadership, and action in the Greater New Orleans Region.

The Charter School Board Building grant provided to the Greater New Orleans Foundation created an opportunity to increase effectiveness and further improve the quality of New Orleans' public school options.

The Approach

GNOF took The Ed.ucateD Approach by engaging in our program design and facilitation process to develop a stakeholder-informed board governance series with the goal of strengthening charter school boards in the Greater New Orleans areas. We developed a four phase design approach, including an expected outcome for each, to guide the process. 

The data collection phase included collecting qualitative and quantitative data to gain input directly from charter school boards, school leaders, district leaders, national experts, and community leaders to better understand the current strengths and challenges within the system. Through those methodologies, stakeholders shared their current priorities, strengths, and areas of growth and opportunities. 

During the initial strategy phase, we presented a series of recommendations to consider which focused on content, format, and cohort development strategies. Most notably, the recommendations for the cohort development strategy emerged directly from the interviews with local organizations that shared their commitment, willingness and aligned priority of further developing the knowledge, capacity and effectiveness of charter school governing boards. The recommendations also included strategies to address anticipated challenges with board member participation. 

As a result of the recommended partnerships and collaborative cohort development strategies, an intentional focus was placed on the development of  formalized partnerships with Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools, New Schools for New Orleans and NOLA Public Schools, resulting in individual meetings with each organizations leadership to share the findings of the data collection process, recommendations and create space to discuss their overall feedback and partnership opportunities. 

The curriculum planning and session design phases were done in collaboration with the Foundation with emphasis on prioritizing intentional partnerships built with those that served and worked with charter boards to create a continuum of support. We presented to the Foundation a scope and sequence for the series that was responsive not only to the needs presented in the data collected in the first phase, but to the feedback of partner organizations and internal deliberations of the Foundation. This included determining the number of sessions, the format, framing questions, content, objectives, and the tools or resources needed for each session.