Our History
Power of Place® was created to address the urgent need to provide educators with a chance to step away from their demanding schedules and enter collaborative, creative, compassionate spaces designed to enable them to learn, grow, reflect, and connect with peers from neighboring communities.
What started as an idea for professional development evolved into a regional learning collaborative where educators from different districts come together to grow professionally, exchange insights, and bring new ideas back to their schools and classrooms.
Power of Place is designed to effect change at the systems level. Participating educators certainly gain new skills and confidence, but their collective learning is what truly moves the needle in school districts.
In 2018, the Essex County Learning Community (ECLC) was incubated through the Reimagine Learning Fund, a multi-pronged effort of New Profit, a national venture philanthropy firm based in Boston. With funding from the Peter and Elizabeth C. Tower Foundation, ECLC was designed to better support teachers and administrators in meeting the needs of the system’s most marginalized students. It recognized that educators needed time and space to interrogate their prior assumptions and biases and harness a much wider repertoire of skills, strategies, and tools to reach all students.
School districts in Essex County responded to an initial Request for Proposals, and six school districts were selected for the first cohort.
A second cohort launched in January 2020. ECLC also convened a “guest faculty” roster of national experts who helped us deliver on the promise of best-in-class professional development. After the initial incubation period, the Essex County Learning Community became an independent project, funded by the Tower Foundation and directed by Full Frame Communications, LLC, with implementation support from the Center for Collaborative Education.
ECLC was initially envisioned as a two-year professional development experience for educators. Each participating district brought together a multi-stakeholder team to meet regularly with other districts in a defined cohort. When the first cohort of six school districts completed the two-year experience, two things happened. First, many of our participants wanted to continue learning in the community they had helped establish. Second, the global pandemic, which occurred toward the beginning of our second cohort’s experience, made it impossible to convene in person. Our response was to invite both cohorts (eleven districts in total) to participate in a robust schedule of virtual learning, thereby transitioning ECLC to an ongoing, voluntary learning network. As we began to emerge from the pandemic, more districts joined ECLC, bringing the number of partner districts to 20. We now serve educators in nearly 150 schools serving approximately 6600 educators and administrators. In all, PoP’s partner districts serve more than 75,000 students across Essex County.
The creation of Power of Place Learning Communities was prompted by ECLC’s continued growth and impact, as well as by inquiries from elsewhere to build regional networks modeled after ECLC. There is an urgent need to provide educators with a chance to step away from their demanding schedules and enter collaborative, creative, compassionate spaces designed to enable them to learn, grow, reflect, and connect with peers from neighboring communities. ECLC is now the flagship of Power of Place Learning Communities, a 501(c)3 that we hope will enable such important work to flourish in many communities.