In 2021, EdSystems began working with the East St. Louis community to engage community, school district, and higher education stakeholders in deep racial equity work in the context of college and career pathways. The goal of this project is to more clearly define core racial equity values, desired outcomes, and strategic priorities and actions to advance racial equity through regional college and career pathway system development and implementation.
Our Role
Through this project, EdSystems has provided East St. Louis with:
- A structured learning community for exploring and seeking to address racial equity in the context of college and career pathways.
- Peer-to-peer learning opportunities with other communities across Illinois.
- Technical assistance on structural issues including pathways and work-based learning design and implementation.
- Processes and systems to conduct authentic stakeholder engagement with an emphasis on elevating student voice.
- Support to utilize disaggregated data to identify racialized opportunities and exclusion within the community and target improvements on racialized outcomes driven by the education system.
- Self-assessment tools to identify community-specific desired racial equity outcomes and racial equity challenges.
- The opportunity to influence state and national policy on methods for advancing racial equity within and through college and career pathways.
- Sub-grant opportunities to enable East St. Louis to carry out these efforts, such as participation in the Health Sciences Career Exploration and Career Development Experience Pilot.
The learnings from this project are helping to inform EdSystems’ racial equity work across our portfolio.
