In a Time of Opportunity
For over 30 years, MakeKnowledge staff have been working on creating new areas opportunity and learning for schools and organizations, across all phases of the design, implmentation, and evaluation process.
Crafting a Plan
A great strategy helps organizations achieve great things. Creating good strategy — making a strategic plan — has many parts. Fundamentally, creating a coherent strategy is a practice of knowledge creation, because it requires leaders to interrogate the qualities of and connections among their vision, the capabilities, and activities of their organization, and the needs of the people they serve. It also requires understanding how to plan and move in a world that is changing quickly and unpredictably.
Organizations come to the strategic planning process at different points. At times, they want to evaluate what seems like an exciting new opportunity. Other times, it can be to make sense of an outcome or broad trend, like the rise of Artificial Intelligence, demographic trends, or pandemic effects on services. Organizations also initiate this work after bringing on new leadership, or in the light of new program evaluation findings.
Grant Writing
In the last several years, MakeKnowledge has helped land over $7 million for organizations launching innovative programs. These include new programs in our core areas of interest – climate/green career pathways, and creating innovative STEM programs for underrepresented youth. Much of this work has been deeply collaborative, building partnerships among K12 and higher-ed educational institutions, industry partners, nonprofit and community partners.
Core Skills & Experiences
MakeKnowledge has deep experience in leading these conversations, and in leading planning efforts that are equally innovative and rigorous. Our earliest work, and the origin of our name, involved deeply understanding how people and organizations create and share knowledge (hence, “MakeKnowledge”). Creating new knowledge is one of the key ingredients to innovating, and harnessing that practice is key to developing a culture of innovation.
Schools talk about innovation a lot, and usually there is no shortage of creativity among the students and faculty. But managing innovation, and building a sustainable culture of innovation, is at least a few degrees more difficult. MakeKnowledge has long experience with the toolbox of innovation. Our design thinking experience goes back to the very earliest days of the Stanford d.school, where our founder worked on a wide range of projects with both local and international clients, ranging from a nearby shelter for the homeless, to an nonprofit organization serving small farmers in the Shan State in Myanmar. Design thinking continutes to have a prominent place in our toolbox. Done well, design thinking methods can generate profoundly insightful, humane, and sustainable innovations. There are many other tools for strategic discovery and innovation in organizations–for designing for emergent possibilities–and MakeKnowledge draws on these as well.
A Map that Matters
At the end of strategic planning process, you and your team will come away with a plan that inspires your community, and a deep understanding of how all of the myriad pieces connect to help your organization and community thrive. A strategic plan cannot just state the goal, but it has to make a coherent argument about what getting there will entail. No matter how ambitious the moonshot, it is critical to ensure that progress will be measurable, and that those managing implementation have the both the freedom and the accountability they need.
Strategic Sprints and Projects
Maybe your organization does not need a comprehensive strategic plan at the moment, but there are still opportunities for work where we might help. Here are some examples of smaller projects we have helped other schools with, that illustrate some of our experience and also some common benefits of our work.
TEDx Conference: For a Bay Area independent school, our founder helped develop a day-long TEDx event that attracted over 700 people in the live audience, and garnered thousands of views online. More than the impact of the conference day itself, the event helped to crystallize a number of important relationships with outside mission-relevant organizations, which in turn allowed the school to grow its reputation and opportunities for staff teaching and learning. The school learned how creative, ambitious execution within its core mission could open up vast new audiences, and allow it to speak with a more confident voice on a bigger stage.
21st Century Skills We helped a faculty team at an innovative California school to lead a two-year exploration to explore which 21st-century skills would matter for its students. The work was highly generative, spawning many other school initiatives in the following years, including the creation of makerspace programs on each of its campuses, and inspiring further work in diversity and inclusion, greening, STEM/STEAM curricular opportunities, as well as helping to guide future curriculum development, assessment work, and facilities planning.
Learn More
We would love the chance to tell you more about our approach, and learn more about your school or district. Please email us at info [at] makeknowledge.org, and we’ll look forward to connecting.