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).
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.
Delve deeper into the work of individual colleges in the Community Vibrancy Cohort by reading their college-specific profiles.
Related Services
Learn strategy development and capacity building skills to expand the college’s approach to student success.
- Tactics for impacting community outcomes
- Focus on next-generation metrics
- Tools to assess market potential
Build a student-centered, evidence-based campus culture with ATD’s intensive three-year experience
- Partnerships with two expert coaches
- Strengths and opportunities analysis
- Support for a customized action plan
Increase institutional capacity for data-informed decision making.
- High-impact, evidence-based strategies
- Interactive, applications-oriented focus
Featured Posts
News & UpdatesUpcoming Events
Leadership
Community Vibrancy Webinar Series Part One: Transforming Community Colleges Through the Community Vibrancy Framework
Join us for this webinar to learn more about the ATD Community Vibrancy Framework and how you can begin applying it at your institutions to support your communities.
Leadership
Community Vibrancy Webinar Series Part Two: Using Community Vibrancy To Cultivate Abundance in Mind, Practice, and Mobility
Join us for this webinar to learn from two community colleges that participated in the inaugural Community Vibrancy Cohort about how they used this new framework to become boundary-spanning institutions to strengthen their support of individuals, families, and communities. You will also learn initial steps you can take to begin effectively utilizing the ATD Community Vibrancy Framework at your own institution.