

Ten Years of Empowerment
Join us in celebrating a decade of empowerment. Read our retrospective magazine to discover our timeline and learn how we work with communities across the United States to advance school system innovation and policy change.

Elevating Rural Colorado
Empower Schools wrote this white paper in collaboration with key partners to capture how five years of investment is elevating rural outcomes in Colorado.

Rural Innovation Toolkit
We built this toolkit is to guide rural stakeholders through the planning, designing, implementation, and sustaining success phases of creating and managing rural school collaboratives, while providing valuable resources and support from technical assistance providers.

Support for Rural Colorado Schools
Bellwether’s case study, identifies promising practices from funders’ early responses to the pandemic and pinpoint the most urgent needs of rural districts today, nearly two years after schools first closed their doors.

The Third Way: A Guide to Implementing Innovation Schools
The Progressive Policy Institute released a how-to guide for legislators, district leaders, and advocates who want to create more of these 21st century schools: The Third Way: A Guide to Implementing Innovation Schools.

Autonomous Schools: A New Path to Growing High-Quality, Innovative Public Schools
This report from Public Impact considers how U.S. school districts increasingly create autonomous district schools to give their schools the flexibility afforded to charter schools, in an effort to provide high-quality, innovative, and diverse public schools at scale.

Denver’s Luminary Learning Network
Exploring new models for governance and investment, Senior Vice President for Education Mary Seawell asked Colorado-based journalist Alan Gottlieb to cover, in real time, the unfolding events that are chronicled in this case study.

From Innovation Schools to an Innovation Zone
This article is part of a Bridgespan Group research project that focuses on exploring the design features of “Innovation Zones”

SEZP, “City of Firsts” Profiled in New Installment of CRPE
The Springfield Empowerment Zone Partnership and the people involved in its design and initial implementation take center stage in a new paper by Ashley Jochim of The Center on Reinventing Public Education.