Alumni Convening
Teach For India
For 15 years, Teach For India has built a movement of leaders committed to ending inequity. With a vision to mobilize 50,000 leaders by 2032, the organization shapes policy and grassroots innovation across nearly every Indian state.
- Focus: Building a movement of leaders who drive change through personal mastery and ecosystem leadership.
- Model: Structuring the fellowship around three pillars defined as leading self, leading others, and leading India.
- Impact: Supporting alumni entrepreneurs and policy advocates who address learning loss and launch development collectives in regions like Bihar.
- Big Idea: Building a regional education movement where alumni act as conveners to align shared vision and distributed leadership across diverse stakeholders.
Teach For America
For over thirty years, Teach For America has mobilized a nationwide network to advance equity across fifty regions. The organization aims to double student outcomes in reading, math, and career readiness by the year 2030.
- Focus: Advancing educational equity through a unified systems change strategy and localized community action.
- Model: Utilizing social network analysis to understand and activate the influence of sixty thousand alumni within local systems.
- Impact: Placing alumni in key roles as district executives and elected officials to drive systemic policy shifts in cities like Denver.
- Big Idea: Solving the challenge of communities being “program-rich but systems-poor” by aligning resources and improving coordination within existing systems.
Insight 1: Building Coalitions Through Trust, Inclusion, and Purpose
Coalitions that drive real change begin with trust. “Trust and getting people comfortable in the same room is the first thing we start with,” explained Gabi Katz, Managing Director, Research & Evaluation at Teach For America. The legitimacy of the convener matters; it is not always the organization with the most resources, but the one with the deepest relational capital. “Where we haven’t built that trust yet, we don’t see it as smart for us to act as the convener.” Equally important is who is in the room. Including students and families shifts the dynamic, since “when it’s just leaders talking among themselves, they don’t feel the same urgency,” Gabi noted. Their presence disrupts hierarchy and grounds discussion in lived experience. In Baton Rouge’s literacy coalition, this shift became clear when a parent responded to a school leader’s comment about home support by saying, “Well, we don’t really get any information from the schools about what’s happening.” Rather than escalating tension, the exchange led to a more balanced strategy that recognized shared responsibility.
Beyond trust and inclusion, purpose must be compelling enough to galvanize action. “Make it sharp—sharp enough that it’s okay for some people to self-select out,” Ram, Director of Alumni Impact at Teach For India, emphasized. Convenings should rally commitment around a clear vision, not seek universal consensus. Finally, coalitions are not static structures but fluid networks. “When there’s a trigger—like a policy change or crisis—having a diverse network means you can mobilize quickly,” Ram reflected. By including students, teachers, and government officials, coalitions become more resilient and responsive, evolving through co-creation rather than rigid design.
Insight 2: Shifting Power to Students, Parents, and Communities
Bringing students and parents into coalition spaces isn’t enough—they must be positioned as equal contributors, not as token voices. "The risk of having students in the room is that they can be tokenized or discounted," Franco Mosso, CEO of Enseña Peru, reflected. To counteract this, convenings must be designed to facilitate genuine power-sharing. A simple but powerful approach was demonstrated in Baton Rouge. "At the very outset, we were clear: you’re all here not just as professionals, but as community members," Gabi Katz shared. Participants introduced themselves in both their formal roles and as members of the community, breaking down institutional barriers and creating space for authentic dialogue. This shift became evident in Pune, where a battle for secondary school access stalled at the government level. When traditional advocacy approaches failed, parents took charge. "We started talking to parents, explaining that if their children stayed in public schools, they wouldn’t have to pay expensive secondary fees," Ram recalled. Parents mobilized—confronting local politicians, showing up at government offices, and drawing media attention. "A few parents and students just decided to turn up—and suddenly, the press picked it up." The pressure worked, resulting in the establishment of new secondary schools that continue to operate today. These examples illustrate a key lesson: coalitions move when power shifts. It’s not enough to convene the right people—students, parents, and communities must be positioned as active agents of change. When convenings recognize the agency of all participants and create structures that allow them to exercise that agency, coalitions transform from spaces of discussion into engines of action.
Emerging Questions- Healing as a Foundation of Convening:
How can convenings intentionally create space for healing, especially in contexts shaped by historical injustice, while still advancing collective action?
- Shifting Power:
How can convenings elevate lived experience alongside formal credentials, ensuring community members are equal contributors to decision-making? “The intention is to disrupt power, but with love.”
- Scaling from Local to Movement-Level Impact:
How do small, intimate convenings connect to and grow into broader movements for change?
- Collaboration vs. Contestation:
When should convening focus on building consensus, and when is mobilizing collective pressure necessary to challenge power structures and drive systemic change?
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