*4.2. Translate Research into Practice*

As partners from a research university, our most important contribution was to be able to bring research to bear on the problems we were trying to address. As such, it was beneficial for us to be immersed in the research on college access and choice to identify research-informed strategies to address the complexity of the financial aid process. Perhaps the most notable contributions were the findings from Bettinger and colleagues that information-only strategies are not effective, at least in terms of improving college participation or financial aid application behavior, and the evaluative work of College Goal Sunday finding that the program was not reaching the students and families it was designed to serve. Financial aid information nights tended to be the most frequent intervention, mainly because they were inexpensive to provide. We could change our strategies to more active interventions because the research was compelling.

#### *4.3. Collaborate with Trusted Community-Based Partner Organizations*

Say Yes to Education played a critical role in the success of the collaboration between BPS and the university. As a backbone organization in a collective impact strategy, its primary responsibility is to manage the collective's shared agenda. They very effectively built trust among BPS leaders and local community partners. In many large districts, multiple partners provide similar services in schools with little coordination. Say Yes brought those partners together to identify ways to work together, and we found that the most effective mechanism was data sharing. Every pre-college program in Buffalo assisted its students and families with the financial aid application process. We found that sharing data across partner organizations incentivized more program providers to collaborate more effectively with school counselors.

#### *4.4. Listen to the Experiences and Needs of Education Partners*

Finally, and perhaps where we started, it was essential to listen to school counselors and tailor our strategies to the school's needs. We started by spending the first six months at a single school to better understand counselors' challenges in helping students with the college choice process. Then, we spent a semester learning with and from the school counselors at our pilot project site to understand better whether our design worked in the school context and how to adapt it to changing circumstances. When we began scaling the project up to serve the entire district rather than a single school, we conducted a site visit at each school to discuss the plan with the school counseling teams. Each school followed different schedules, identified different classes that would be optimal for the computer lab portion of the intervention, and had different strategies for connecting students with the FAFSA completion volunteers. That time was necessary for the earliest stages of our work. While the trust established from the shadowing experiences and the advocacy of our partner counselors was helpful, we found it beneficial to continue to earn that trust with each set of school partners. Once the project concluded, we conducted follow-up visits with each school to learn what worked and could be improved. This formative evaluation was equally important for managing and sustaining relationships while refining the program to meet the needs of each school.

Effective collaboration takes time and, in our experience, cannot be rushed. We did not begin the relationship with a solution in search of a problem. Instead, we worked with the district to identify the problems most salient to them and coordinated with partners to develop, test, and refine a strategy to simplify the financial aid application process and increase the number of students eligible for the Say Yes tuition guarantee. Our work was possible because we constantly communicated with partners and used data to shape our work. The project is entering its tenth year, and the partnership continues to strengthen and grow. The project looks very different today than in the first year of implementation. Some of that is a consequence of the learning that occurred through the formative evaluation process. However, several program changes resulted from modifications to the financial aid application, including moving the opening of the application from January 1 to October 1, shifting from the PIN to the Federal Student Aid (FSA) ID username and password, and launching the IRS tax retrieval tool.

The collaboration among Say Yes, BPS, and the University at Buffalo established a community support network that attends to the six dimensions St. John identified in the human capabilities framework. Our focus in this study was on a specific and targeted intervention, but the larger collective impact initiative attends to the financial well-being of families. In partnership with the department of social services (DSS), Say Yes places a social worker in every school to identify and respond to the emergent needs of students and their families. The health clinics, legal clinics, and the growing mental health support are all related to the family's financial well-being because most would not have the resources to seek these services independently. During the pandemic, Say Yes led an effort to make laptops available to families that did not have the technology and to develop solutions for families that did not have high-speed internet access in their homes. Our work on the financial aid application process was not central to the preparation students received for college but Say Yes partnered closely with BPS to provide extended learning time after school, on weekends, and in the summer; they developed strategies to improve early childhood preparation; and they are assisting the district with some of their professional development needs. The entire program is predicated on improving college opportunities and Say Yes leveraged its relationships to establish a social network to support students through that process. They worked with employers to identify pathways through college or directly into the workforce. They engaged partners in the schools, community centers, churches, and the business community to make the promise of postsecondary education pay off for the students in the hope that they will return to the community and pay it forward to those that follow.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** The data for this study are publicly available through Federal Student Aid and public archives can be found at https://studentaid.gov/data-center/student/applicationvolume/fafsa-completion-high-school (accessed on 1 May 2023).

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.
