You can’t fund what you can’t see: One community’s answer to philanthropy’s oldest problem

On a Wednesday afternoon in January, a small data team in Muncie, Indiana sat down with a
group of educators and workforce leaders and laid out a number that stopped the room: 20,000.

That’s how many hours of work-based learning—internships, apprenticeships, career-connected
experiences—the Muncie area will need for freshman class of Muncie Central High School under
Indiana's new diploma requirements. One class. One small-sized city. Twenty thousand hours--
21,225 hours to be exact—that do not yet exist in any organized form.

It’s a staggering finding and early evidence of just how hard the work will be.

The number did not come from a consultant's projection or a state agency's estimate. It came
from a survey that a Muncie Community Schools' Educational Data and Outcomes team
designed, administered, and analyzed in a matter of weeks. The public school system with one
high school asked every freshman what kind of diploma they intended to pursue. They matched
those intentions against the state-mandated work-based learning requirements attached to each
diploma track.

For years, the organizations serving Muncie's students operated the way most communities do--
in parallel, occasionally in conversation, rarely in genuine coordination. A student might be
enrolled in a literacy program, receive mentorship through a youth organization, and be flagged
for additional support by a school counselor, with none of those parties aware of the others. Not
because they were indifferent but because the information infrastructure to connect them simply
did not exist.

The George and Frances Ball Foundation and its Cradle to Career Muncie initiative have given
funders a clearer view of how their dollars could make a meaningful difference. Previously,
philanthropists could fund individual programs and require end-of-year reports. What they could
not do was see how the investments fit together.

This is a central challenge of all place-based philanthropy. What makes Muncie unusual is what
happened next.

In the fall of 2022, Phil Boltz, a career educator, joined Muncie Community Schools with an
unusual mandate: build a data team that could serve not just the school district, but the entire
ecosystem of organizations working to support students and their families. The school system
was looking for ways to address chronic absenteeism and low graduation rates.

Phil Boltz addresses Collaborative Action Networks about Muncie schools' data team.

The structural decision that followed was consequential. Rather than establish an external
nonprofit, which would have preserved a certain independence but created persistent barriers to
data access, the team embedded itself inside the school system. That single choice transformed
what was possible. Questions about what partners could access shifted from what you can see to
what you can share.

By spring of 2024, the data team was delivering tailored dashboards about student proficiency in
math and reading, attendance patterns, and early-grade behavioral summaries without
compromising individual student privacy. For the first time, a program serving students at a
particular school could understand who those students were as a group, what they needed, and
how their work fit into a broader web of support. Funders could see collective impact across
multiple organizations without touching individual records.

The George and Frances Ball Foundation has connected hundreds of stakeholders across the
community over the last four years. All are focused on working toward a common goal—“a
livable wage for everyone,” says foundation President and CEO Thomas Kinghorn.

Master teachers, secretaries, principals, guidance counselors, and classroom teachers once spent
hours compiling spreadsheets, generating reports, and navigating informal channels to get basic
information to the people who needed it. The data team could now produce that same
information in moments.

The most significant early finding was not what anyone expected.

Five years of extracurricular participation data was analyzed and a striking pattern emerged:
students who participated in any school activity—athletics, theater, academic clubs, anything--
showed measurably better attendance, higher graduation rates, and stronger diploma trajectories
than their peers. Among students qualifying for free and reduced lunch, the gap between those
who participated in extracurriculars and those who did not was nearly 14 percentage points.

The implication was immediate and actionable. The question for the George and Frances Ball
Foundation was no longer simply how to fund more clubs or afterschool programming. It
became how do we identify the students who want to participate but face barriers like cost,
transportation, time, awareness? How do we remove those barriers?

“We live in a community where students and families are impacted by generational poverty,”
says Kinghorn. “Using the StriveTogether model in our own Cradle to Career Muncie, we are
laser focused on getting families what they need and to give the next generation a pathway to
prosperity.”

Graduation rates tell a parallel story. Since the Cradle to Career Muncie initiative launched, the
district has seen a more than 10-point increase in graduation rates. The community's current
target is 95 percent by 2030, not an aspirational talking point, but a data-informed goal the team
believes is within reach.

Practitioners doing similar work exist in Baltimore, Dayton, and Memphis. Much of it is
sophisticated and well-resourced. What Muncie's team has not found is another community
operating at their scale—with their level of integration, their access to school-system data, and
their manageable network of community partners—that has built this kind of dedicated
infrastructure.

That scale is not incidental. It is the point.

Muncie is large enough to have genuine systemic challenges—poverty, workforce displacement,
educational inequity—and small enough that the people responsible for addressing those
challenges can all fit in a room. There are not 500 nonprofit organizations to coordinate. There
are 20. It means a finding about extracurricular engagement can move from analysis to
philanthropic strategy to program design in months rather than years.

The work-based learning challenge now facing Muncie—those 20,000 hours for a single
freshman class—will confront every community in Indiana, and most communities across the
country, as states update diploma requirements to emphasize career readiness.

The lesson for philanthropy is that every community must confront the same underlying
question: who is responsible for ensuring that the organizations serving our students can see the
full picture, coordinate their efforts, and demonstrate collective impact?

Building shared data infrastructure is unglamorous work. It doesn’t fit neatly into a single
program officer’s portfolio or a single organization’s mission. It requires sustained, multi-year
investment, trust built across institutional boundaries, and a willingness to fund the connective
tissue of a community rather than its individual parts.

Too often, the tyranny of the urgent pulls attention and resources toward immediate programs,
crowding out the long-term investments that allow communities to align, learn, and improve
together.

Muncie’s philanthropic community made that bet, and data is beginning to show it’s worth.

For foundations watching from the outside, the more pressing question is no longer whether this
approach works—but what it will cost not to try.

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Juli Metzger

Juli Metzger is a former educator and newspaper editor and publisher. She is Chair of the
Indiana Youth Institute, and on the C2Cmuncie.org Collaborative Network Leadership team.