Milwaukee Succeeds Attends Annual Cradle to Career Convening

From September 19-21, the Milwaukee Succeeds team joined over 600 community leaders from 60+ communities across the nation for the annual StriveTogether Convening. The event, which was hosted in San Francisco, explored our shared North Star: a future where every child has every opportunity to succeed.

Through numerous keynote speeches, sessions and workshops, the team explored innovative ideas for transforming the educational landscape to achieve more equitable outcomes for our children. Milwaukee Succeeds' ECE Data Analyst Samantha Reynoso even contributed to this educational lineup with a presentation on how cross-community collaboration can lead to change.

The event opened on September 19 with a welcome ceremony at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. The informal celebration afforded team members the opportunity to reconnect with partners from across the country and develop new relationships with other community organizations. The following two days were filled with inspiring messages from a variety of leaders, including Erik Stegman of Native Americans in Philanthropy, Jerelyn Rodriguez of The Knowledge House, Dr. Tim Lampkin of Higher Purpose Co., and Jennifer Blatz of StriveTogether.

With more than 50 sessions to choose from, each Milwaukee Succeeds team member was able to dive into a different facet of the work, from youth empowerment to policy work to data.

The Milwaukee Succeeds' session, co-presented by Kevin Meagher from Building our Future in Kenosha, was titled The Wisconsin Interstate Data Coalition. In it, Samantha and Kevin discussed how and why the coalition came to be, the various iterations it has gone through and the benefits that come from collaborating across partnerships. Particularly, the coalition is able to leverage their relationships to support each other with data collection, statewide advocacy, technology and thought partnership, creating a more robust data infrastructure for all four communities involved.

The session concluded with an informal discussion in which attendees thought about how they could utilize such a framework to bolster their ongoing work - both in data and beyond. The spirited conversations allowed participants the chance to form new relationships and explore how this type of collaboration can help them fuel change in their communities.