A Personal Story

As I excitedly get ready to launch our plans for 2012, I thought I’d take a moment to share some the motivation and passion behind the work my company does.

I never anticipated building a company full of people that love helping schools and nonprofits attract resources and achieve more than they think possible.  But here we are at the beginning of a new year and after eight years of creating a model that works and a reputation of results for almost 100 schools and nonprofits. 

They say that when you find the work that results from your passion intersecting with your talents, it doesn’t feel like work – it feels like play.  That is how I feel about the work of alinea. 

I want to share a story about my journey.  Three things happened at about the same time that put me on my path.  

Three Gifts From the Universe

As I look back I realize that the challenges on my life journey have been gifts from the universe that have allowed me to combine my passion to have a positive impact on the world with my talent to inspire and empower people and organizations to achieve more than they think they can.  

The First Gift – My Son Billy

Within four weeks after my son Billy started kindergarten at a school in one of the top two schools districts in the state, we got our first call from his teacher.  During group time down on the carpet, Billy couldn’t sit still; he would do a somersaults.  When standing in line Billy would be the one to swing his backpack around and inadvertently hit another child.  That was the start of what has become a very long journey of two parents trying to meet the needs of their child within an education environment that values its systems over meeting the education needs of individual students. 

The most important thing I learned was to trust my instincts about whether my child’s needs were being met and if I hit a road block to move up the chain of decision makers.  For five years we battled against language like “this is our system,” “Billy is making poor choices,” and “bad behavior.”  Until this year, none of his teachers took much time to get to know Billy as an individual.  Billy was evaluated by the school system, outside of the school system, never finding any type of definite diagnosis.  Billy has a little sensory integration issue, is very verbal and likes to use his hands.  All his teachers agree he’s bright, but he’s awkward with his peers.  We’ve seen child psychologists to help him with his behavior in school.  Having an IEP (individualized education plan) was a disaster, doing more harm than good because of its focus on special education versus individual needs.   

After all these years, today Billy has the best teacher ever.  She focuses on finding ways to keep Billy engaged, and she helped us discover that anxiety drove many of Billy’s distracting behaviors.  The love and creativity of his teacher, our unwavering message to Billy that he is unique and wonderful, and a very low dose of medication to help with his anxiety has changed his life.  He’s making friends, focusing in school and most important, he doesn’t start the day with a stomach ache anymore.   

The Second Gift – Launching a New School

About the same time my son entered kindergarten, I was asked to be the first founding board member of a new charter school located in the inner City of Milwaukee and serving low-income families.  During my interview with the founder, I asked “Why me?  I don’t have any experience with schools or education policy.”  I added, “I’m just a parent with children who go to school in a top performing school district.”  But the founder of this school said, “That’s why I want you on my board.”  She didn’t want an insider.  She wanted someone who wasn’t tied to the status quo, as well as someone who would know how to secure resources for the school and build community support.  This experience taught me a lot about education reform, how charter schools get approved, the extent to which politics impacts and gets in the way of making decisions that are in the best interest of children. 

The Third Gift – Charter Schools Ask for Our Help

In about 2000 the City of Milwaukee was blessed with an $18 million donation from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for the Small School Initiative.  An organization was created to facilitate the creation of ultimately about 40 new charter schools.  In about 2005, one of these charter schools came to us feeling very nervous about their ability to keep their new school sustainable over the long term.  The group of teachers who designed an amazing curriculum realized they didn’t have expertise to build community support.  For nine months, we worked with this school to help them tell their story, build community awareness, communicate with parents and recruit professionals to sit on committees to help them with marketing.  Soon after, we were asked by another charter school to help them build community support, and then another.  We became sponges for education reform, and we began to make observations about a very important gap not being address in schools, namely sustainability through community engagement.  This experience became the seed for what is now our proven model for securing community support and resources.

In a way, I was personally led to this work, this way of having a positive impact on the world.  And it has not been difficult to attract people to the alinea team who also have a passion for education.  People want to help, but they don’t know what to do.  When a school hires alinea, they learn how to inspire people with their story, be clearer about what they need and how people can help, and strategically cultivate relationships in order to build community support and resources. 

The overwhelming response I get from people who attend my presentations is “You give us hope that we can do this?”  You see, the issue isn’t money; there’s plenty of money in the world.  The issue is doing what’s in the best interest of children and then learning how to effectively engage the community in your mission. 

Every day, my son William is a constant inspiration and reminder of the importance of the work that alinea does and the need to bring our message of focusing on what’s possible to communities everywhere. 

I hope you will join the alinea team and me on our journey to provide education to children that engages and inspires them to bring their passion and talents to others so they may fulfill their unique purpose.  

How You Can Help

Here are four easy ways you can contribute to the reach of our work:

1.     Become a follower of my blog and pass it along to others, and join our email list.

2.     Refer us to a school or nonprofit that could benefit by alinea’s unique community engagement program.

3.     Purchase my book, The Secret to Better Schools; A New Mindset For Engaging the Community, and give it as a gift.

4.     Make a donation to the alinea Foundation in order to empower organizations with few resources to benefit by our community engagement program. Please email me for more information.