Client: A Major League Baseball franchise's community partnership with an adopted Baltimore public elementary/middle school.
Services: Strategic roadmap development, accountability framework design, partnership facilitation, education strategic planning, community partnership strategy, organizational development consulting.
The Challenge
A professional sports franchise had invested for years in a partner school in Baltimore, funding tutoring, mentoring, enrichment, and wraparound supports. The relationship had produced real results for students, but as the investment grew, so did a familiar school community partnership challenge: multiple partners (the franchise, the school, the district, and the lead community-schools agency) were each tracking success differently, with no shared accountability framework to show how the investment connected to student outcomes and school improvement goals, or how decisions about funding and programming should be made going forward.
Lisa was engaged to build that shared framework and to help the partners actually use it together through strategic planning, partnership facilitation, and organizational alignment.
The Approach
Lisa began by grounding the work in the school's own data and priorities rather than imposing an outside framework. This evidence-based strategic planning approach meant:
- Synthesizing the school's official performance plan, an independent community needs assessment, and direct conversations with school leadership into a single, coherent picture of school progress, performance, and strategic priorities
- Building a theory of change and logic model connecting every category of investment (funding, staff time, in-kind supports) through activities and outputs to the school's own school improvement goals
- Designing a balanced-scorecard style dashboard with leading indicators, so partners could see progress before year-end results came in, not just after, creating a clearer system for performance measurement and accountability
- Facilitating structured working sessions with all partner layers to align on roles, decision rights, communication norms, and how disagreements would get resolved, turning an informal relationship into a governed school-community partnership with clear organizational accountability
- Producing a full strategic roadmap document alongside partner-facing presentation materials, so the same information could support both internal strategic planning and public storytelling
Throughout, Lisa was intentional about framing: community context (poverty, housing instability) was presented as backdrop for the school's gains, never as a deficit narrative about students or families. This approach kept equity-centered leadership and community engagement at the center of the work.
The Outcome
The school entered the partnership having already made significant gains, moving off the state's list of lowest-performing schools, more than doubling in enrollment, and posting some of the strongest attendance and early-literacy improvement rates in the district. The strategic roadmap gave the franchise, the school, and the district a shared, evidence-based strategic planning framework to plan the next phase of investment together: clear priorities, a common set of metrics, and an agreed process for making decisions as circumstances change.
The engagement also produced a reusable school partnership model, a partnership discussion guide and roadmap template, that the franchise can apply to future school partnerships and community investment initiatives.
Details in this case study have been generalized to protect the confidentiality of individuals and specific partner agreements.
