Operationalizing Collective Impact to Ensure Education Success for Students with Experience In Foster Care

Background and Purpose: Students with experience in foster care (SEFC) face profound systemic barriers to postsecondary success, resulting in college completion rates significantly lower than those of their peers. To address these disparities over 20 states have developed interdisciplinary statewide networks of support. While several of these networks have been functioning for almost two decades, there is very little research on how these networks have developed and function. Drawing on the qualitative findings of a dissertation regarding network formation and sustainability, this paper identifies how intentional collaboration between higher education, child welfare systems, and other critical services agencies, and organizations can ensure that support for SEFC moves beyond isolated campus programs toward a cohesive, networked infrastructure, and presents a blueprint to guide practice change.

Methods: The building blocks used to develop the blueprint for practice change included (a) the Collective Impact framework, (b) key theoretical foundations, and (c) themes emerging from a dissertation study of the formation and sustainability of statewide networks of support for SEFC. The Collective Impact (CI) framework serves as a critical bridge between theory and practice. The theoretical foundation of this work integrates Social Movement Theory (SMT) and Strategic Action Fields (SAF) theory to contextualize network development. SMT provides a lens for parsing the political opportunities created by legislation and the mobilizing structures required to organize diverse stakeholders. SAF theory illuminates how actors—including higher education staff and faculty, child welfare administrators, advocates, students with lived experience in foster care, and philanthropy—interact, mobilize, and compete for resources to create stable, transformative fields of support.

Results: We aligned the core themes of the dissertation (Capacity, Balancing Subject-Matter Expertise and Lived Experience, Identifying Champions, Defining Network Boundaries, Building Relationships, Mobilizing for Action and Sharing Power, and Defining Network Boundaries) with the CI framework and foundational theories to develop a robust blueprint for systemic change, and identify statewide networks as the lynchpin serving the critical function of "backbone organizations" to a larger movement of support for SEFC.

Conclusions and Implications: The research affirms that the presence of a functional backbone organization allows networks to remain resilient against environmental "shocks," such as legislative changes or fluctuations in funding and human capacity, while ensuring the voices of those with lived experience remain central to decision-making. Reimagining higher education and improving educational outcomes for students with experience in foster care requires leveraging diverse cross-sector collaborations to build sustainable systems of access, support, and success.