A conversation with Karen Pittman and Merita Irby
I had the opportunity to sit down with my colleagues, Karen Pittman and Merita Irby, to capture the latest updates on the Alliance for Youth Thriving — a gathering place for coalitions, networks, organizations and innovators committed to ensuring that all young people have access to the powerful learning experiences and supportive relationships they need to thrive. The Alliance is designed to connect leaders across education, youth development and career pathways to tackle common challenges and identify solutions in one sector that can accelerate progress in another.
Q: Why create the Alliance for Youth Thriving — and why now?
Merita: Together with our partners, we launched the Alliance because the moment demands it. While we know all young people have potential, they are living and developing through times of particular stress. We see it in the headlines and in the data — growing rates of disconnection, chronic absenteeism, mental health challenges and the changing landscape in an age of AI. We also know that when youth thrive, we all thrive — our communities, economy and democracy depend on them.
Times are changing rapidly but the good news is there is incredible agreement about what makes a difference in a young person’s trajectory: powerful learning experiences that are meaningful, relationship-rich, and build real-world competencies. Given the range of experiences and opportunities young people need — especially as they move through their teenage years and into young adulthood — we need the people in every system throughout the full learning ecosystem working together to ensure they are having these experiences at the times, in the places and with the people that meet their learning needs and interests.
We formed the Alliance as a gathering place with action-focused field leaders and share the “why and why now” in their own words.
Q: How did the idea for the Alliance emerge?
Karen: The seeds of the Alliance were planted in the spring of 2024 at an invitational gathering on Centering Youth Thriving: From Systems to Ecosystems, supported by the Wallace Foundation. Eighty national and local leaders from the education and youth development fields came together to develop action steps to capitalize on the convergence of perspectives about the need for more powerful learning experiences. We captured these perspectives in Too Essential to Fail: Why Our Big Bet on Public Education Needs a Bold National Response — the evidence review commissioned by Education Reimagined and developed with extensive input from the ecosystems working group of the Science of Learning and Development Alliance. Leaders and members from both groups are founding members of the Alliance.
We appreciate how Jane Quinn, a leader in the community schools movement, summarized the work we’ve done together over the past year: “By recruiting national organizational partners across multiple professional disciplines, and listening carefully to their ideas, the Alliance’s leadership has taken an evolutionary approach to reimagining what 21st century learning can and should look like.”
Q: What does it mean to move from systems to ecosystems?
Merita: It really is about both mindset shifts and action shifts. Every experience matters but too often the demands of operating within a system make it difficult for us to do what we intuitively know is best for the young people we work with. This is especially true for educators in schools because of the demands placed on them to deliver on key metrics for all students while working within an archaic system and an outdated “grammar of schooling.”
There is also a lack of awareness of or connection to the learning that is happening elsewhere in a young person’s life — and the systems that have been designed to create and support these learning experiences. These complementary infrastructures — some developed for enrichment and exploration, some developed as alternatives to the traditional education system, others building out pathways to the workforce — must become more visible. These include things like provider networks of community-based organizations, workforce development systems, opportunity youth networks, and national service programs like conservation corps.
[Related: Navigating to next — Making complex pathways clearer with people-powered supports]
As an Alliance, we are working on how systems can give people the expanded space and reduced pressure to see how a more flexible approach to building learning experiences can truly engage learner’s interests and agency and how we can collaboratively scale the ideas, tools, programs and models that are working. When stressors hit, it’s too easy to fall back into traditional ways of doing things.
Q: Can you give us a concrete example of what this tension looks like?
Karen: Look at the piece in EdSource this week from one of our National Partners — Hedy Chang of Attendance Works. Hedy, along with Jessica Gunderson and Katie Brackenridge, from the Partnership for Children and Youth, discuss California’s new policy to address chronic absenteeism — highlighting both the potential and the tension.
“In July, California’s new attendance recovery policy came into effect. This approach allows school districts to recoup lost attendance dollars and learning time by providing extra classes for absent students during non-school hours. If implemented effectively, this policy could provide much-needed financial support while reengaging students and motivating them to learn.
If poorly implemented, the recovery policy could undermine the strength of the existing expanded learning system and reduce student engagement by making students with poor attendance feel stigmatized or even punished, while providing activities that don’t inspire participation.”
They highlight that this tension is underscored by conflicting language in the policies:
“Among other rules of the new attendance recovery policy, learning sessions must be taught by credentialed teachers and include instruction that is substantially equivalent to the school day …” but at the same time it also indicates that schools can use “funding from the recently increased $4.5 billion Expanded Learning Opportunities Program that every California district serving TK-6th grade students receive” and “must follow all the requirements for Expanded Learning Opportunities Program implementation.”
Editor’s Note: Expanded Learning Opportunities Programs are defined as “pupil-centered, results-driven, include community partners, and complement, but do not replicate, learning activities in the regular school day and school year.”
Not only are these two aspects of the policy directly contradictory, but they also highlight the tendency to only credit learning that looks like school. The tension between in-school and out-of-school learning will continue to exist until we recognize that the differences in learning experiences associated with when and where learning happens are really differences in how and why learning happens.
Q: How do we address this tension?
Karen: We have to switch not only our mindsets, but also our language. We can’t keep saying things like “the fun learning happens over here and the required learning happens over there.” All learning needs to be relevant and challenging. How do you help schools become more interest-driven and relationship-rich, like community-based programs where young people and families vote with their feet? And how do the range of systems developing learning experiences outside of schools enhance and illuminate the learning that is happening so that young people can get credit for learning whenever, wherever and with whomever it is happening?
Alliance champions and partners are considering both and are coming together to think about the core messages that help us to articulate in new ways why anytime, anywhere learning matters.
Adapted from National League of Cities: Community Learning Hubs. 2020
Q: How is the Alliance moving this message?
Merita: The Alliance focuses on learning ecosystems and powerful learning experiences through a 360 | 365 | Up to 25 lens. That means ensuring young people have meaningful, relationship-rich, competency-building opportunities across the full day, the full year, and through the transition to adulthood.
Practically, our work is to make those experiences visible, valued, creditable and connected to clear pathways.
We are taking the time to build trust so that we can develop shared responses to the rapidly changing policy landscape as well as cross-pollinate solutions developed in one system and share them for uptake in the others.
Alliance National Partners are committed to sharing their resources, expertise and challenges – and engaging and supporting their state and local partners in this work.
Q: What can Youth Today readers do — and can they join the Alliance?
Karen: Youth Today is one of the key communications vehicles for the Alliance — and you’ll see this highlighted in our ongoing When Youth Thrive, We All Thrive column. Over the coming weeks, you’ll read interviews from Alliance members who are reflecting on where they sit in the learning ecosystem and how they are pushing themselves to ensure every connection is optimized.
National Partners are continuing to join. We also welcome anyone with a commitment to building more powerful, community-rooted learning ECOsystems where Every Connection is Optimized to join us as an Alliance Champion. Join here.
Merita: Also ask: How are you helping to strengthen the connections in the ecosystem that the young people you are working with navigate every day? If you work with young people, you’re part of that ecosystem. Your daily work matters and is essential to this effort.
Start with the young people you are working with and for. Ask them about all their learning experiences — inside and beyond your work with them. Four questions we encourage everyone to use:
- What are you passionate about learning and doing?
- How relevant and rigorous is what you’re learning with us?
- Where do you find support — or barriers — outside of our work together?
- How can we help connect you to the people and places you need, and ensure you get credit for learning you’ve already done?
When we start asking these questions, we stop treating learning as a set of disconnected experiences and begin to see the full journey each young person is on. That shift is at the heart of the Alliance for Youth Thriving. Together, we’re building the trust and sharing the tools, training and technologies to make every learning connection visible and valued so that young people don’t just navigate pathways, they create them.
