Results of Hope Street Group’s 2013 Annual Colloquium have been released today, reflecting the collective work of over 100 influential thought leaders, experts and dedicated field practitioners from political, business and civic sectors. The conference, held on March 13, 2013 at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., convened prominent innovators for a full day of unique idea generation, goal setting and forward-thinking problem solving.

Collaborative, bipartisan working groups engaged in open and constructive conversations aimed at generating real solutions to pressing problems in U.S. education, healthcare, and jobs and workforce development systems. The morning sessions began with facilitated discussions in each working group to identify the barriers and significance of potential game-changing solutions. The groups then voted on the top solutions where Hope Street Group’s coalitions could drive impact and built action plans for continued progress. The day’s outcomes were presented to a panel of policy and business leaders at the closing of the day, and have since been translated and vetted by each participant into memos that Hope Street Group released today.

In the Education working group, participants addressed the most significant current needs of educators and students. Participants determined that to encourage beneficial change, the U.S. must:

• Create and provide innovative resources to support and drive school data culture
• Embed professional development initiatives into school culture to empower teacher performance
• Improve alignment of school curriculum and resources to the Common Core State Standards

The Jobs and Workforce Development working group decided that to prepare students and workers for meaningful, 21st century careers, the U.S. needs to:

• Pursue skills development programs that are aligned with employer needs and job creation
• Strategically integrate work-centered learning into secondary education
• Develop comprehensive, interconnected data systems to better inform workforce development stakeholders
• Fund diverse learning and skills achievement pathways
• Incentivize flexible workforce funding

The Healthcare working group, the newest of Hope Street Group’s initiatives, explored how to embolden patients to take more active roles in their own healthcare by acting more like true consumers. During this difficult and often controversial discussion, the group developed preliminary ideas on how to:

• Better serve the 10 million Americans with multiple chronic conditions
• Increase transparency in the healthcare field so patients can make wiser and more cost-effective healthcare decisions

Sponsored by PG&E, LinkedIn, Cancer Treatment Centers of America, Walmart, and Sg2, the 2013 Colloquium opened with a speech by Delaware Governor Jack Markell and White House National Youth Ambassador Jairus Cater who said, “Hope Street Group brings the right people together to work on big problems facing our country. I believe that their collaborative approach to problem solving will be instrumental in moving us forward.”

Monique Nadeau, Hope Street Group President and CEO, continued by saying, “Technology has enabled collaboration on a greater scale and we [Hope Street Group] have been convening our network to identify and promote rational methods of incentivizing better outcomes. By building ‘Coalitions of the Reasonable,’ we generate and implement evidence-based solutions from the local to federal level.”

Additional Colloquium speakers included Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman, Julius Genachowski, Chairman of the FCC, Dr. John Noseworthy, Mayo Clinic President and CEO, and Tony Miller, Deputy Secretary at the U.S. Dept. of Education.

Hope Street Group is a 501(c)3 organization working to strengthen the foundational underpinnings of the nation’s economy—education, healthcare, and jobs—by identifying and promoting rational methods of incentivizing better outcomes. www.hopestreetgroup.org