Opportunity 2040

This plan was influenced by years of work with countless stakeholders to inform the strategies and desired outcomes of our collaborative efforts. As the COVID pandemic exacerbated our economic and educational challenges, Commit and CPAL recognized the compelling need to strategically align their complementary infrastructures toward a common economic mobility agenda, reflecting the following shared regional vision:

Opportunity 2040 draws on significant philanthropic investment, led by national investor Blue Meridian Partners and buttressed by a broad network of local and national funders that will collectively play a critical role in accessing, improving or creating public funding to positively affect student outcomes. This work will include piloting and scaling critical initiatives that can substantially accelerate student success, living wage attainment and greater economic opportunity across the overall ecosystem.

The Plan will be primarily capitalized using nearly $370 million of catalytic philanthropy over the next 18 years to improve our region’s access to roughly $6 billion of unaccessed federal and state funding while concurrently increasing the effectiveness of $3.4 billion of existing public funding and unlocking $3.7 billion of new funding.

Opportunity 2040 stands apart because it targets both in-classroom and out-of-classroom strategies, focusing on strategies such as pre-K enrollment, teacher effectiveness, and college advising as well as critical factors like access to public benefits, affordable housing and adequate healthcare.  The Plan leverages public funding to address the underlying systemic root causes leading to our outcomes instead of simply continuing to treat the symptoms resulting from them.

Research, local data, and community expertise indicate it will take stacks of interventions, rather than single topical focus, to accelerate achievement of our regional North Star goals of doubling living wage attainment and halving child poverty by 2040. We have organized these interventions into student domains, community domains, and complementary interventions, all working in concert to accelerate outcomes for Dallas County children: