Sangamon County Continuum of Learning

Leadership Community

The Sangamon County Continuum of Learning was founded in 2005 and arose from local leaders’ attempts to answer the following question: What should and could Sangamon County be doing to ensure that its children, teenagers, and young adults are progressing successfully through each stage of their development and are poised to contribute to the region’s economy?

In 2015, The Continuum of Learning released the Sangamon Success report, a set of 25 recommendations for improving educational outcomes for youth who are less advantaged in Sangamon County. These recommendations highlight the need for sustainable, evidence-based programs that are driven by the efforts of local stakeholders and community organizations. This report became the guiding document for Innovate Springfield’s Social Innovation program. Since then, Innovate Springfield has served as the intermediary organization for the Continuum of Learning’s Sangamon Success Initiative, working with local non-profits and service providers to increase their understanding of evidence-based service to the community.

Lead Intermediary Organization

Innovate Springfield

Areas of Expertise

  • Collective Impact
  • Research and Information Sharing
  • Data Gathering
  • Social Innovation Incubation

Prioritized Focus Areas

  • Health Sciences
  • Information Technology
  • Manufacturing, Engineering, Technology, and Trades
  • Transportation, Distribution, and Logistics

Key Successes

Release of the Sangamon Success Progress Report in 2021

2-Year Goals

  • Conduct interviews and community-based research with various stakeholders in career and technical education (CTE) in the Sangamon County area.
  • Articulate the commonly-identified areas for collaboration, areas for improvement, barriers to establishing effective CTE programs, and CTE programming gaps.
  • Work with its partners at the UIS Center for State Policy and Leadership to compare Sangamon County’s current CTE initiatives, desired initiatives, and programming gaps with empirical research about CTE programs.
  • Organize a convening to present the resources summary, share information about the evidence-based initiatives, and determine a community-wide strategy for connecting existing initiatives with evidence-based practice and tools for rigorous evaluation and determining whether new programs need to be introduced to fill gaps in services.
  • Pursue relevant funding opportunities and implement community strategy.

Community Updates