CLIENT CASE STUDY
Nashville Early Education Coalition (NEEC)
Project: Collaborative Strategy and Evaluation
Sector: Coalition/Collaborative
Focus: Early Childhood/Childcare Access
Project Length: 2 Years
Establishing Coalition Governance and Strategy
The Nashville Early Education Coalition (NEEC), founded in 2024, is a group of stakeholders dedicated to addressing Nashville’s childcare crisis who are working to create a centralized, integrated childcare system that ensures all children can access affordable, high-quality care and education.
The earliest years of a coalition’s life cycle are critical. Establishing strong but flexible governance structures, creating sustainable collaborative processes, and building trust with partners through values-driven action define this phase. Elevate supported NEEC from its earliest days, coming alongside its leadership to ensure the coalition built a strong infrastructure for sustainable collaboration.
Services
Governance design and implementation
Session and meeting facilitation
Coalition and pilot project evaluation strategy and design
Data collection (interviews, surveys, and outcomes harvest) and analysis
Strategic support and thought partnership
Our approach
In the early days of Elevate’s partnership with NEEC, we met weekly with NEEC’s Executive Director to surface early priorities, support partner relationship building and engagement, collaboratively build a strong governance structure, and establish processes to support collaboration (e.g., meeting cadence and goals for Executive and Advisory committees, etc.). We supported the earliest convenings of NEEC partners, designing and facilitating sessions to support engagement and trust-building. Our deeply embedded, flexible, developmental approach allowed us to tailor our support to NEEC’s emergent needs, providing strategy, facilitation, evaluation, and research support as needed to support a successful launch.
Elevate designed and implemented a custom-built collaborative evaluation, assessing a wide range of measures including awareness of and alignment with NEEC’s goals, strength of relationships and trust across partners, and identification of early impacts through outcomes harvesting. We conducted an evaluation of its early pilot initiative, Bridge to Sustainability, surfacing findings that informed two white papers we co-authored with NEEC. These white papers brought widespread awareness of the challenges nonprofit childcare centers serving low-income families face in building sustainable business and advocated for dedicated public investment in childcare.
As NEEC continues to grow and strengthen, we are adapting our support to ensure NEEC’s leaders have the right balance of ownership of their work and support from the Elevate team. We continue to lead its evaluation and data efforts and provide strategy/governance support, and we are scaling back our facilitation support as NEEC team members step more into that role.
“Launching a coalition is both exciting and incredibly complex, and I can’t imagine having navigated these early years without the Elevate team beside us. They brought the right combination of strategy, facilitation, evaluation expertise, and humility, always adapting their support to meet the moment. What I value most is that they never approached the work as outside consultants; they became true partners, deeply invested in our mission and committed to helping us build something that will endure. Their support has not only strengthened NEEC’s foundation but has also been invaluable to me personally as I made the shift from direct-service leadership to coalition and systems-change work. Having trusted partners who could challenge my thinking, provide perspective, and encourage me along the way has helped me lead this work with confidence and a willingness to embrace a whole new way of creating impact.”
Project Team
Amy Merritt Campbell, M.Ed.
CEO, Project Principal
Jessica Gibbons
Chief Practice Officer, Project Support
Alyssa Reynolds
Consultant, Project Support
“As a mom of a preschooler, it’s so deeply rewarding (and personally important) to be able to contribute to early childhood efforts at a system level. Melanie is a once-in-a-generation kind of leader, and the early childhood partners at the table are some of the most dedicated and thoughtful practitioners I’ve had the pleasure of working with. I’ve learned so much about collaborative work from the near-decade that we’ve been at this table, and I am so grateful we continue to be able to add value.”
Let’s work together.
Interested in working together? Fill out some info and we will be in touch shortly! We can't wait to hear from you!