Community Vibrancy

ATD’s Community Vibrancy Framework is a new roadmap for community college sustainability, a pathway for ensuring relevance with value, and a redefining moment for the student success movement. The framework is aimed at expanding access to higher education and lowering costs for students, creating greater social and economic mobility for more learners and their families, and helping communities flourish across a broad range of measures. It is designed to move student success work beyond completion and connect institutional transformation efforts with community impact.

Now the backbone of ATD’s approach to innovation, coaching, and service delivery, the framework helps colleges:

• Conduct intentional outreach connecting their work to populations left behind by postsecondary education.
• Expand affordable access to provide financial support and keep student debt down.
• Create early momentum by improving first-year progression and persistence.
• Ensure completion of degrees and credentials of labor market value.
• Spark upward mobility promoting economic and social advancement.
• Establish vibrant communities with individual, family, and societal gains.

To test the framework and associated curriculum, ATD — with support from Ascendium Education Group and Crimsonbridge Foundation — engaged 15 ATD Network colleges to be part of its first Community Vibrancy Cohort.

The colleges tested new tools and training materials to help them understand local communities in new ways that will lead to upward mobility for individuals and their families and help communities flourish and thrive economically. By using these tools and materials, the colleges aim to collect data to help them assess market potential among opportunity populations, track institutional data that connect early momentum and milestone momentum (“inside-outside” metrics) to workforce outcomes and community vibrancy metrics (“outside-inside” perspectives).

Learn More

To read about the work of these 15 colleges and lessons learned that other community colleges can use in implementing their own community vibrancy agenda please download Connecting Access and Credential Attainment to Economic Mobility and Community Vibrancy: Fifteen Colleges Test ATD’s New Transformational Framework.