Dear Pioneers,

We are ready to say farewell to 2017 and welcome the opportunities that lie ahead in the new year. Two weeks ago, the entire Education Reimagined team came together for an intense two-days of strategic planning and came away feeling reenergized and wholly committed to accelerating the learner-centered movement across the country.

At the core of our strategy session was the framework that to make the shift to learner-centered inevitable and irreversible, there are three levers that have to be pulled simultaneously—building public will, creating enabling policy conditions, and demonstrating proof of concept. Levers that take a movement to pull. When our two days came to a conclusion, we had a strategic vision for our next three years of work. One that we will share in the new year.

At its heart, our work is to foster connections, relationships, and partnerships among pioneering practitioners, learners, leaders, and organizations across the country. It truly takes a diverse community of learner-centered pioneers to make this transformation a reality.

We believe that how you do the work is as important as what you are doing. To accelerate the emergence of learner-centered systems, our work has to be done in a human-centered way. That’s why we build connections among pioneers inside of communities.

Being in community means welcoming and celebrating the gifts of every education stakeholder—young learners, parents, educators, administrators, employers, community leaders, policymakers, and more. Just as we want to build socially-embedded learning communities where learners and adults are seen for their unique potential and rich gifts, it’s important that we, in the movement, see each other for our unique gifts and contributions. We are the leaders we have been waiting for, and, together, we are unstoppable.

If you find this to be as inspiring as we do, we’d love for you to share our work and the work of the movement with your friends, family, and colleagues over the holidays. Whether you pass along this issue of Pioneering or make a donation yourself, we appreciate your support and can’t wait to bring you more issues of Pioneering in 2018.

Happy Holidays,

Kelly