Building Together: A Look Inside the Collaborative’s Advisory Committee
Chelsea Coffin, Jordan Frasier-Lakes, Fidelia Igwe, Griselda Macias, Bethany Monea, Barrie Moorman
Advisory Committee Working Group Chairs
When the DC Postsecondary Success Collaborative launched its Advisory Committee this year, we did so with a simple but ambitious belief: no single organization, institution, or sector can solve the challenges facing DC's young people alone.
The Advisory Committee was created to bring together leaders from across the DC’s postsecondary ecosystem - practitioners, advocates, and community leaders - to help shape the Collaborative's work and strengthen the systems that support young people and residents as they navigate postsecondary life.
Over the past months, we've had the opportunity to serve as chairs of the Advisory Committee's four working groups. While each group focuses on a different priority area, we've all been working toward a shared goal: building a more connected, equitable, and effective postsecondary ecosystem for DC learners.
Practitioner-Facing Tools & Shared Infrastructure
The people closest to students are often those with the clearest view of what's working - and what's getting in the way. That's why this working group is focused on building and sustaining a strong base of practitioners who can consistently inform and guide the Collaborative's work.
Through this group, counselors, advisors, career coaches, and other direct service professionals help ensure that the Collaborative remains responsive to the realities practitioners face every day. Together, we're exploring questions such as: What advising practices are most effective? What tools and resources would make it easier for practitioners to connect students to postsecondary opportunities across multiple pathway options? How can we create stronger spaces for practitioners to learn from one another and elevate their expertise?
This work also helps shape key Collaborative initiatives, including the Knowledge Network, Practitioner Forum, and future practitioner-facing resources like a citywide postsecondary pathways database. Ultimately, our goal is to ensure that the voices of those working directly with young people remain at the center of the Collaborative's strategy and priorities.
I keep coming back to one thing practitioners tell me over and over: they want to feel heard, not just surveyed. Direct service providers aren't asking for another framework or another form to fill out. They want a real relationship with the systems that shape their daily work, and they want to know that when they raise a concern or share something that is actually working, someone on the other end is listening and will respond. That is what excites me most right now about building stronger feedback loops between frontline staff and the wider ecosystem of organization and system leaders, funders, and policymakers. Imagine a counselor or advisor noticing a barrier and watching that insight shape a policy change within months instead of years, then actually seeing what came of it. That kind of loop changes the whole feel of the work. It turns practitioners from people who simply carry out decisions into people who help shape them. That shift, moving from reporting upward to truly listening across, is the most promising thing we can do to make this work more responsive and more human.
Jordan Frasier-Lakes, Chair
Advisory Committee Engagement & Collaboration
DC is fortunate to have a deep bench of organizations and leaders committed to postsecondary success. Yet even in a city as connected as ours, meaningful collaboration requires intentionality.
This working group is focused on strengthening relationships across the ecosystem, creating opportunities for members to learn from one another, and ensuring the Advisory Committee itself remains an active, engaged, and impactful community of leaders.
At its core, this work is about turning relationships into coordinated action on behalf of DC's learners.
The Collaborative has been a powerful space for relationship-building, peer learning, and partnership. It creates meaningful opportunities for colleagues to problem-solve together, share resources, and coordinate efforts in support of student success. In a city where organizations are often working not only on the same issues but also with the same young people, our students are best served when we collaborate intentionally. It is a privilege to help foster those connections through the Advisory Council.
Griselda Macias & Barrie Moorman, Co-Chairs
Inclusion of Youth Voice
If we want to build systems that truly work for young people, those young people, and the families and alumni who have experienced those systems firsthand, must help shape them.
One of the ways the Collaborative is making that real is through a Youth Ambassador Council (YAC). YAC members are DCPS and DCPCS students who advise on programming, review resources, and ensure that practitioner efforts stay grounded in what learners actually need and experience. Their participation is stipended, because the Collaborative believes that young people's time and expertise deserve to be valued, not volunteered.
What we find most exciting about the YAC model is that it works in both directions. In addition to bringing their expertise to the Collaborative, Ambassadors also carry information and resources from the Collaborative to their schools and communities, making them genuine leaders in DC's postsecondary ecosystem, not just participants in it.
This working group is focused on deepening that kind of authentic partnership, ensuring youth voice isn't gathered and set aside, but woven into how we make decisions, design programming, measure success, and hold ourselves accountable to the students at the center of our work.
DC students are at the center of our mission as champions of postsecondary success, and we believe their voices should also be central to our work as a Collaborative. Youth partnership matters because young people are the ones navigating the systems we have created for them on a daily basis, but they're often invited into our conversations about these systems after decisions have already been made (if at all). To achieve better outcomes, we must move beyond asking for youth feedback and start designing with young people, not just for them. Getting it right means youth voice isn't a one-time-event or a rubber stamp for adult decisions, it's embedded in how we make decisions, design programs, and define success. When we are authentically engaging youth voices in our work, we have to be ready for our work to be transformed.
Fidelia Igwe & Bethany Monea, Co-Chairs
Strengthening Policy Influence & Citywide Impact
The work happening in schools, community-based organizations, and higher education institutions is deeply shaped by the policies, funding decisions, and citywide strategies that surround it. And yet, the practitioners closest to young people often have the least access to the rooms where those decisions get made.
This working group is focused on changing that by building stronger connective tissue between practitioners and system-level actors, so that information, insight, and influence flow in both directions.
Rather than creating a new body, we're focused on leveraging what already exists. The Talent Pipeline and Compact 2043 are two citywide efforts with real momentum, and we see significant opportunity for the Collaborative to identify where its strengths overlap with their priorities and lean in strategically. That analysis is already underway, and we expect to have a clearer picture of focus areas by the fall.
In the near term, the working group is also supporting the development of a Collaborative one-pager for the new mayoral administration, incoming Councilmembers, and new State Board of Education members - ensuring that postsecondary success is visible and well-represented as new leaders settle into their roles. Longer term, we're working to develop a practitioner engagement strategy that identifies the spaces and decision-making moments where practitioner voice should be elevated, and builds the infrastructure to make that possible on an ongoing basis.
Lasting progress in postsecondary success requires stronger connections between practitioners and system leaders. This work is about creating the structures at the DC Postsecondary Success Collaborative for those voices to inform one another, so that policies reflect both the realities of implementation and are well-known by practitioners.
Chelsea Coffin, Chair
The Power of Being in Community
Although each working group tackles a different challenge, we've all come away with the same realization: meaningful systems change begins with relationships.
In a sector that often moves at a relentless pace, the Advisory Committee has created space to pause, listen, challenge one another, and think collectively about what young people and residents in DC need most. We've celebrated successes, wrestled with difficult questions, and surfaced new ideas that none of us would have arrived at alone.
The relationships being built through this work may ultimately be just as important as the outputs. They are creating new connections across organizations, strengthening trust across sectors, and laying the groundwork for deeper collaboration in the years ahead.
What has surprised and inspired us most is how interconnected this community already is. Nearly every meeting uncovers shared experiences, former colleagues, or long-standing partnerships. It feels like a family reunion, and those connections only deepen each time we gather. There’s a true sense of belonging.
The work of improving postsecondary outcomes in DC is long, and it should be! Building stronger systems, deeper partnerships, and better outcomes for young people doesn't happen through a single convening or in a single year. It happens when people continue to show up, listen to one another, challenge one another, and work toward shared goals over time.
That is what makes the Advisory Committee so meaningful. Beyond the ideas generated or initiatives advanced, it has become a community of leaders committed to learning together, strengthening one another's work, and building a more connected postsecondary ecosystem for DC. We're excited to continue this work in the months and years ahead and grateful to everyone who is helping make that vision a reality.