TAMUK Partnership Chosen for National Effort to Improve Rural Higher Education

Texas A&M University Kingsville

KINGSVILLE (News Release) - The UpSkill Coastal Bend Partnership has been chosen by CivicLab as one of five rural partnerships across the U.S. to participate in a two-year initiative to improve higher education and workforce systems. Supported by Ascendium Education Group, the UpSkill Coastal Bend Partnership will receive training, technical assistance, and direct financial support valued at $150,000 to develop and implement system-level strategies that create pathways to prosperity for low-income learners.

The UpSkill Coastal Bend Partnership was selected through a national call for proposals. Each partnership in the cohort includes higher education institutions, nonprofit organizations, public agencies, private-sector partners, and other local stakeholders that work together to improve education and workforce outcomes. To be selected, partnerships were required to submit plans that both improve outcomes for their residents and make lasting changes on higher education and workforce systems during the two-year grant period.

“Though many partnerships are deserving of this recognition and support, the UpSkill Coastal Bend Partnership demonstrated they had the relationships, capacity, and capability to make real change,” said Dakota Pawlicki, director of Talent Hubs at CivicLab.

The UpSkill Coastal Bend Partnership aims to align regional efforts and improve economic vitality by increasing the educational and job attainment of rural adults. The Building Rural Community Learning Systems initiative will focus strategically on three selected Coastal Bend counties: Brooks, Duval, and Jim Wells. Led by a guiding team comprised of representatives from Education to Employment Partners, Coastal Bend College, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, Workforce Solutions of the Coastal Bend, Coastal Bend Council of Governments, and Craft Training Center of the Coastal Bend, this project aims to address regional needs by creating pathways to prosperity for low income learners, including adults entering or re-entering workforce training programs.

“This project truly is a collaborative effort of workforce development, education, and economic development experts working together to drive long-term system change and improve equitable access to career opportunities for rural Coastal Bend residents. Our ultimate goal is regional economic growth through alignment of partner strategies and programming around workforce centers in each of the counties that we are serving,” said Jeff West, Executive Director of Education to Employment Partners.

The UpSkill Coastal Bend Partnership joins a cohort of other partnerships from California, Florida, Indiana, and New Mexico. This cohort will meet virtually and in-person to share ideas, resources, and receive technical assistance.

“Rural communities have largely been left out of national initiatives designed to improve postsecondary education and workforce outcomes,” said Kirstin Yeado, program officer at Ascendium. “Ascendium is pleased to support this diverse cohort of partners committed to strengthening their collaborative efforts and building the systems necessary to ensure more learners from low-income backgrounds earn degrees and credentials. We anticipate this work generating many lessons learned on how to build the capacity of postsecondary education and workforce training systems within a rural context.”

The initiative launched in February 2022 with Coastal Bend’s guiding team attending a two-day Stakeholder Engagement Process Learning Lab at CivicLab’s headquarters in Columbus, Ind. The team will return in April 2022 for CivicLab’s System Building Lab to improve plans for making lasting change.

About the UpSkill Coastal Bend Partnership: The UpSkill Coastal Bend Partnership aims to align regional efforts and improve the Coastal Bend region’s economic vitality by increasing the educational and job attainment of rural adults to address workforce needs. The project aims to re-engage adults in career pathways related to healthcare and professional services. For more information, visit https://www.upskillcoastalbend.org

About Ascendium Education Group: Ascendium Education Group is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization committed to helping people reach the education and career goals that matter to them. Ascendium invests in initiatives designed to increase the number of students from low-income backgrounds who complete postsecondary degrees, certificates and workforce training programs, with an emphasis on first-generation students, incarcerated adults, rural community members, students of color and veterans. Ascendium's work identifies, validates and expands best practices to promote large-scale change at the institutional, system and state levels, with the intention of elevating opportunity for all. For more information, visit https://www.ascendiumphilanthropy.org.

About CivicLab: CivicLab, (a program of the Community Education Coalition) is a nonprofit institute dedicated to advancing the practice of civic collaboration and leading complex social systems. CivicLab’s approach is to: 1) learn what makes community collaboration work at its best, 2) document the discoveries, and 3) teach and share the practices broadly. The purpose of the work is to help communities increase their collective capacity—which is their ability to get things done, together. Since its inception, CivicLab has partnered with over 300 communities and organizations across the U.S. and trained more than 14,000 leaders of foundations, educational institutions, government, corporations, and community development organizations.

CivicLab is the home of Talent Hubs and the National Talent Network. The Talent Hub designation signifies that a local or regional cross-sector partnership has met rigorous standards for creating environments that attract, retain, and cultivate talent, particularly among today’s students, many of whom are people of color, the first in their families to go to college, and from low-income households. The designation serves both as an aspirational target for other cities to aim for and a platform from which cities designated as Talent Hubs can build. The National Talent Network is a group of nearly 100 cross-sector partnerships working collaboratively to connect learning to economic opportunity in the places they call home.