A Population Group Hub for the people building systems that work across a whole life, not a single stage of it, across Greater Philadelphia and New Jersey.
Leaders Learn Better When They Learn With and From Each Other
The central value of the Hub is the creation of an ongoing Community of Practice in which leaders working within the same field can learn with and from one another.
Traditional professional development frequently assumes that expertise flows from an expert to a participant. The Hub model recognizes another important source of expertise: the accumulated experience of peers who are confronting similar challenges in different organizations and communities. Research supports this approach. Vescio, Ross, and Adams' review of research on professional learning communities examined 11 studies and concluded that well-developed professional learning communities can positively affect professional practice and, importantly, student learning. Their findings emphasize the value of sustained collaboration, collective learning, reflection on practice, and professionals learning from one another rather than relying exclusively on isolated training.
The objective is therefore not simply networking. It is to create a trusted learning community where leaders can: share models and practices that are producing results; examine what worked, what did not, and why; troubleshoot common implementation challenges; identify practices that may be transferable across organizations or communities; develop partnerships and collaborative initiatives; and convert frontline experience into knowledge that can influence the broader field.
A Community of Disability Innovators
The Institute is organized around five Communities of Practice, each built on a system, and three Population Groups, each built on people whose lives run through all five of those systems at once. People with disabilities are one of those three.
Disability is the clearest case for why the Institute is organized this way. A person with an intellectual, developmental, physical, or behavioral disability encounters education, workforce, housing, food, and health systems continuously and across a lifetime, and each transition between them, from school to work, from family home to independent living, from pediatric to adult services, is a point at which support is commonly lost.
The People with Disabilities Hub brings together identified leaders from the Greater Philadelphia and New Jersey Social Innovation Awards whose work advances inclusion, independence, opportunity, and quality of life, including supported employment, accessible and supportive housing, inclusive education, self-direction, family and caregiver support, and person-centered service design. Because disability runs through every Community of Practice, participants also work alongside the Education, Workforce, Housing, Food, and Health Hubs rather than separately from them.
The Social Innovation Awards use public nominations and regional review to identify the leading social innovators and changemakers, including leaders advancing disability inclusion alongside other interconnected social challenges. Rather than creating another network based primarily on organizational size, title, or institutional affiliation, the People with Disabilities Hub begins with identifying the leading changemakers who are having community impact.
By uniting them, the People with Disabilities Hub creates a distinctive community: practitioners learning from practitioners, leaders who are actively designing, implementing, testing, and refining solutions in real communities. Many of them are disabled people themselves, and the practices that make a system genuinely accessible are usually theirs.
Moderated Communities of Practice
A moderator for the People with Disabilities Hub will be announced ahead of the first convening, facilitating peer learning, surfacing promising practices, connecting participants around common challenges, and helping translate practitioner experience into knowledge that can benefit the broader field.
At each of the six Institute convenings, participants will engage in both cross-sector leadership development and People with Disabilities Hub Learning, creating leadership breadth while preserving the depth that makes peer learning valuable.
Leadership development is focused on developing seven core competencies: Accountability Governance • Transformational Leadership • Human-Centered Design & Community Validation • Making Nonprofit Markets Work • AI-Enabled Leadership & Organizational Capacity • Systems & Policy Change • Change Management & Organizational Transformation.
People with Disabilities Hub Learning is focused on participants developing shared models and practices to learn with and from one another and identify innovations worthy of broader dissemination. Selected practices will be developed into practitioner-driven case studies for publication in the Social Innovations Journal.
