Getting Started

Are you working to promote economic mobility for children and families? Are you curious about how cross-sector partnership can address systemic challenges? Want to learn more about how housing and education can come together to advance mobility from poverty? This resource is for you.

Toolkit Overview

This toolkit is intended as a resource for individuals and organizations seeking to build and advance cross-sector partnerships to accelerate the achievement of shared outcomes.

Section 1: Housing And Education Overview provides background information on the housing and education sectors, including an overview of funding sources, regulation, governance structures and common actors. This section also outlines the housing and education outcomes that Enterprise Community Partners and StriveTogether seek through their work, offering a useful starting point for identifying shared outcomes and aligning work.

Section 2: Advancing Housing And Education Partnerships is organized around stages of developing and implementing housing and education partnerships focused on shared outcomes. Through Enterprise’s work in providing technical assistance and capacity building for housing and education collaboration, as well as Urban Institute’s related research, five key stages of partnership emerged as a common trajectory for housing and education partnerships. These stages move from assessing existing conditions to understand local needs to using the power of partnership to advocate for systems change. It is important to note that individuals and organizations may move through these stages in a different order than presented here due to the local context or partnership opportunities.

The following table summarizes the partnership stages and highlights how each can connect to the StriveTogether Theory of Action™, an established framework that shows how youth-focused collaborations can advance through a series of six “gateways” toward systems transformation. The toolkit’s partnership stages complement the theory of action and focus specifically on the steps that housing and education practitioners can undertake to develop and implement a partnership focused on shared outcomes.

Ready to get started? Take a look at the Introduction, step into the Housing and Education Overview, or jump right in with the Partnership Stages. If you prefer to use the toolkit in PDF form, you can also download it here.