FUELING COMMUNITY COLLEGE INNOVATION
We believe community colleges are the boldest engines of innovation in higher education.
Fueling Community College Innovation supports our mission by embedding learner-centered, workforce-aligned practices into the institutions that serve millions of New Majority Learners.
WHAT COLLEGES NEED
Community colleges play a critical role in connecting learners to opportunity, but too often innovation is fragmented, episodic, and hard to sustain. Promising pilots launch and then stall, leaving learners without consistent access to redesigned programs, supports, and pathways that work for their lives.
This is not a failure of ideas — it is a failure of infrastructure. Without changes to strategic plans, funding models, data culture, and institutional policies, learner-centered, workforce-aligned practices remain isolated rather than embedded. Fueling Community College Innovation focuses on transforming how institutions operate so that innovation becomes standard practice, not a standalone initiative.
WHAT CHANGES FOR LEARNERS
High-quality, career-connected programs and supports are no longer a matter of luck; they are consistently available across institutions.
Consistent access to high-quality programs and support
Systems built around real-life needs
Programs and supports that are built to last
WHAT WE DO
Through partnerships with colleges, state systems, employers, and learners, the Lab moves innovation from the sidelines to the center of institutional strategy.
By bringing learners into the room with employers and educators, we use human-centered design to ensure that solutions are not just efficient, but deeply responsive to the lived experiences of those the system has traditionally left behind.
Strategic Planning + Change Management
Combining human-centered design with traditional strategic planning so colleges can align mission, strategy, and operations with the future of work and the needs of New Majority Learners.
EXPLORE RELATED PROJECTS
IMPACT
We don’t just design programs — we design for system-level impact.
We change systems by centering New Majority Learners in a collaborative process that results in a ripple effect of transformation across multiple levels, from individual programs and colleges, to regions and state systems.
We measure progress through four elements of change that signal system transformation:
Connect learners, employers, faculty, and leadership through formal, cross-functional partnerships that shape ongoing program and practice decisions
Build the internal capacity and infrastructure to sustain and scale innovation, including the use of noncredit data, workforce representation in governance, and sustainable funding models
Enable more flexible, aligned, and learner-centered programs by updating institutional policies and practices across program structure, delivery, and support
Shift mindsets so innovation is expected, embedded in how institutions design, deliver, and sustain programs