The Fund's Golden Circle

By Barbara Bellissimo, Executive Director

In November, the entire Fund team got together for our semi-annual planning retreat. In preparation for our day together, we all read Simon Sinek’s Start with Why. If you haven’t watched Simon’s TED talk, you should. The basic premise is to start with why you do your work--instead of how you do your work--when you are trying to craft your mission.

Simon has a structure for this--the Golden Circle. Begin with your why, then move out to your how and what. In our retreat, we spent a lot of time with a lot of sticky notes, wrestling with our Why.

We started with “Improve social & physical well-being and academic outcomes for all Kentucky students”. An OK Why, but boring and not really what gets us up in the morning. So we kept asking, “Why?” Why do we improve social & physical well-being? Why do we improve academic outcomes? Why? Why? Why?!?!? Then it dawned on us.

Our Why lay in the second half of the phrase, not the first.

We don’t get up in the morning because we want to improve well-being outcomes. We get up in the morning because all Kentucky students deserve improved well-being and outcomes. You could practically see the light shining into all of our brains. We spent a little more time wordsmithing, and finally crafted our Why:

Every child deserves.

We firmly believe that every child deserves social & physical well-being and improved academic outcomes. We believe that every child deserves access to a world-class public education. We are driven in our work to serve every child in Kentucky--those that have strong advocates and those that do not. With that as the center of our work, we then crafted the following goal for 2015:

Engage at least one teacher from every district, one administrator from every region and one community partner from every region to disrupt their portion of the system to improve the social, emotional & physical well-being and academic outcomes for all KY students.

And then we created our own Golden Circle:

Now that you know more about our Why, we hope you’ll join our work by following us on Twitter, liking us on Facebook, or attending our upcoming Innovate:Education summit.