Learning is at the heart of the work of Jacobs Foundation (JF). Learning takes place throughout the entire lifespan: in the womb, at home, in day care, at school, and at work. However, three decades of work in child and youth development have shown to the foundation that, worldwide, education systems and institutions too often fail to provide children and youth with effective skills, tools, and equitable opportunities to reach their learning potential and thrive.

Over the next ten years, the Jacobs Foundation aims to become a leading learning foundation, contributing to the creation of learning systems, in diverse contexts, that are adapting to variability in learning and providing all children with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, tools and equitable opportunities to reach their full learning potential and thrive together. To do so, the foundation’s activities will be structured along three interwoven dimensions of learning: Learning Minds, Learning Schools, and Learning Societies.

In each target country, namely Switzerland, Côte d’Ivoire, and Ghana, JF aims to support building and sustaining a trustful, diverse, and dynamic community of stakeholders (policy makers, educators, school leaders, researchers, civil society leaders, etc.) who are learning together to drive systemic change in education, with the support of key decision makers from across the system.

VNL is working with the Jacobs Foundation to develop and adapt a Community Evolution Scale (CES) that will be used to measure the progress of each community towards its objectives. The CES will define the members of and relationships between the active community, offer a holistic picture of the progress of a community towards its objectives, showcase opportunities as well as systemic barriers and challenges for each community to drive systemic change, and surface best practices within and across communities. 

The CES will be used by the community as a self-assessment tool to track its own evolution and health and to continuously learn and adapt, as well as a comparative assessment to provide overarching insights from a macro perspective to make strategic recommendations that amplify and accelerate systemic impact across communities.