“To ensure the best possible future for our community, we need to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to earn a great education.
Building Our Future is a broad-based initiative that seeks to work with our schools and the larger community to eliminate barriers to educational success.”
Todd Battle,
Kenosha Area Business Alliance President
Building Our Future is a broad-based initiative that seeks to work with our schools and the larger community to eliminate barriers to educational success.”
Todd Battle,
Kenosha Area Business Alliance President
What is Building Our Future?
In partnership with StriveTogether, a model in more than 70 communities nationwide, we seek better educational opportunities for students from cradle to career by uniting partners from every sector - community members, education, non-profit, business, faith, government and philanthropy - toward a singular vision and common action. Using data, our networks provide targeted strategies, implement continuous improvement and hold each other accountable. By agreeing on a shared goal, we align partners to move each outcome area, shown below. Currently, we are in what StriveTogether calls the Sustaining Gateway, part of a recognized theory of action to build and sustain a civic infrastructure necessary to improve outcomes.
Building Our Future also partners with The Wisconsin Partnership which is a collaborative effort formed to identify and advocate for state policies that will enable each community to move further, faster toward its early learning goals. This is a real opportunity to move the needle overall, and especially for underserved populations. The Wisconsin Partnership communities collectively serve 25 percent of Wisconsinites age 0 to 8, and 70 percent of low-income Black and Latinx Wisconsinites in that age range.
Building Our Future also partners with The Wisconsin Partnership which is a collaborative effort formed to identify and advocate for state policies that will enable each community to move further, faster toward its early learning goals. This is a real opportunity to move the needle overall, and especially for underserved populations. The Wisconsin Partnership communities collectively serve 25 percent of Wisconsinites age 0 to 8, and 70 percent of low-income Black and Latinx Wisconsinites in that age range.
Our Roadmap
Because cradle to career spectrum is such a wide range, the StriveTogether partnership organizes this into separate outcome areas - what we call our roadmap.
Tenets of Collective Impact & How We Do the Work
Collective Impact focuses not on programs, but on large-scale, system-wide social problems. The idea of collective impact is to bring a large number of people together in connected sectors - not to implement something new; but to change the way they work and the environment they work within. Building Our Future acts as the backbone organization to this work, supporting the function of its five tenets:
Our Principles
United Way of Kenosha County is dedicated to ensuring every child in our community leads a healthy productive life. We support the work of Building Our Future as education is the cornerstone to a child's development and future success.
Our partnership is important because it strengthens the alignment of all education sectors in Kenosha County which are working together to ensure cradle-to-career success for all children.
Tara Panasewicz
Chief Executive Officer, United Way of Kenosha County
