Seek Common Ground supported 15 community organizations and leaders across Akron, Cleveland, and Southeast Ohio implementing innovative approaches to meet student needs using a whole child approach through our unique Action Accelerator model. The Ohio Whole Child Action Accelerator demonstrates the importance of engaging and supporting communities in co-creating sustainable change so that students, families, and communities can thrive.

Together, we launched the Student Action Network for Equity, concluded our biggest Action Accelerator to date (in Ohio), and continued to ensure, through our ARPA Action Accelerator, that communities were involved in setting priorities for federal relief spending.

The organizations in the third phase of Seek Common Ground’s ARPA Action Accelerator set out to build bridges and bust silos across agencies to ensure the promise of the influx of funding could be fulfilled.

Meet a few of the inspiring Ohio leaders and organizations we’ve gotten to know.

As the pandemic forced schools across the country to close in the spring and summer, policy actors in the education sector began to formulate solutions that could get students and educators safely back to school in the fall.

But for many local community activists, one voice was missing in the debate: their own.