Overview

The Center for Inclusive Innovation was created as Digital Promise’s call to action to engage new and critical voices, perspectives, and creators—students, parents, and community members who are the ones most impacted—working in partnership with school districts and educators to transform education.

In 2020, we launched the Center for Inclusive Innovation as a national Digital Promise Center of Excellence focused on building the capacity for districts and communities across the country to engage in R&D. We engage teams of systems leaders, educators, parents, students, and community-based organizations, in collaboration with researchers and developers, to address a challenge and emerge with a tangible solution.

In 2022, we completed work on several projects supporting 30+ school districts working in partnership with their communities to tackle challenges from engaging high school students in writing to supporting student mental health to increasing district capacity to recruit and retain a diverse workforce. We published the stories, outcomes and journey maps documenting how the R&D process guided the development of solutions and the outcomes. You can access the stories on our website for an overview of each project.

Our work continues to expand to include national convenings, partnerships and collaborations and developing the capacity for school districts to lead R&D with communities. We continue to share our learnings and practices from the work with the hope of transforming education to enable historically and systematically excluded students to thrive.