Challenge: PVUSD serves 18,000 students from kindergarten through twelfth grade across 36 school sites. With legacy curriculum and instructional practices impacting student outcomes and leading to declining enrollment, there was an urgent need to transform the district.

Solution: Created & implemented a Career & Technical Education (CTE) strategic plan for all interdisciplinary STEAM subjects, including curriculum modernization, training and professional development, funding, and partnerships. Built multiple professional learning communities, launched a number of new 2-year courses tied to local labor market trends and in partnership with community colleges and industry partners, increased dual enrollment, led workshops for 100s of educators, and designed and ran STEAM programming. These efforts resulted in growth of the CTE program to 4,000 students, improved student outcomes, a funding plan resulting in $15m in new restricted grant funding, and dozens of other key impacts over a six year (and counting!) engagement that is now expanding to other departments within the district office.

Challenge: Top independent school (a founding member of G30 Schools), while quite traditionally successful, knew that to best prepare students for the future they needed to develop more independence, ownership over their learning, and 21st century human skills.

Solution: Supported senior leadership down to frontline educators to pilot and iterate over five years a multi-week entrepreneurial and co-creative journey where students investigated personal passion projects in partnership with adults, free of the inherited structures and restrictions of their already award-winning “normal” school program. Student projects launched businesses, sparked curiosity that led to graduate school theses, and healed interpersonal relationships within and outside of the community, while in parallel the consulting and coaching process completely changed the organizational culture of the school to be significantly more creative, innovative, and collaborative.

Challenge: The Exploratorium and NASA invited us to design a hands-on experience for their Mars Perseverance celebration, one that would engage both adults and children by generating a felt sense of the excitement and challenge involved in missions to space, and would draw visitors not just to the events or exhibits but to the Exploratorium & Chabot overall.

Solution: Connect visitors to the actual problems of making machines that can survive on Mars, through real-(outer)-world challenges such as determining the right size wheels to handle Mars regolith, and by leveraging an open-source scale model rover platform developed by our team (with student input). The exhibits were constantly crowded and both the Exploratorium and the Chabot Center extended its duration multiple times.

Problem: Digital NEST is a regional nonprofit, high-tech training and collaboration space for youth that has served nearly 5,000 students. But they realized technical training wasn’t enough, and were looking for support to intentionally interweave the development of the ‘soft skills’ needed to truly prepare youth for a future of unpredictable changes in workforce needs due to AI, robotics, and other emerging technological and societal shifts. They also needed to document and codify their internal training and development processes to prepare to scale to multiple locations.

Solution: Advised and consulted on a broad range of projects over 6 years to support scaling from a single after-school center to a 5-site award-winning pillar of youth and workforce development for underserved populations that provides the skills, network, and resources to foster economic equality. Close partnership revealed the insight that the solution was not a new curriculum, but rather an expanded culture. Our long-term relationship focused on building internal capacity to hold space for a culture of growth, designing onboarding experiences to prime the pump, and co-creating feedback loops and safe space for the culture to sustain and grow. Today, Digital NEST continues to expand its footprint and impact throughout the state, and they have no plans of slowing down.

Bay View Academy (BVA) – A public charter school committed to re-humanizing education for all. A young school transitioning from a startup to a sustaining organization, we began helping BVA clarify its vision and mission through co-creative, community processes, and continued with leadership and board development to ensure mirroring of organizational principles throughout the community. The school continues with a strong commitment to teacher training and community building around Restorative Practices, which it recognizes as the key element to transforming education: the relationships involved. Eliad Group brings its extensive experience in Restorative Practices and organizational transformation to support this endeavor from a strategic level as well as through embedded, day-to-day practices to shift to partnership with students as the basis for community-based learning.

Shikshankur [shik-SHAN-koor] means “the seed of education”, and it is growing as a school in the foothills of the Himalayas in Dehradun, India, literally from the ground up. What is that seed? A deep, human connection, and a culture of equity. Co-creative practices have helped the Shikshankur leadership draw forth into actionable reality their vision and the program, practices, and team that will support it; from hiring, to scheduling, to training, to learning experience and space design, the eye is always on developing a self-sustaining organization with the capacity to continue to grow and adapt, in service of re-humanizing education.

Challenge: California’s Department of Education created a new platform to streamline TK12 career exploration, course management alignment between TK12 and higher ed, college & financial aid lessons and direct postsecondary applications, however each district was trying to implement in a silo without leveraging the learnings of others, slowing the rate of progress across the region.

Solution: Engaged with two dozen districts in a needs analysis process to assess progress to date, challenges and opportunities, and support with developing a multi-year strategic plan to fully implement and leverage this new statewide platform. Beyond individual district support, built an ongoing community of practice to share best practices, exchange case studies, and develop regional relationships to accelerate and deepen impact and student outcomes.

Challenge: World-renowned, sustainability-focused international school in the southern hemisphere was experiencing difficulty realizing the dream of real-world, community-integrated, student-led learning-by-doing.

Solution: Conceived, built, and implemented LEAP Academy, a school-within-a-school that takes learning-by-doing to the next level. Students and teachers partner in designing and executing real-world-integrated, entrepreneurial endeavors to explore and learn about themselves and the world, and bring positive impact to local communities. Running since it was built in 2016 and expanded to broader ages, LEAP Academy has informed the design of additional schools and programs around the world.