*1.1. Say Yes to Education—Buffalo*

Say Yes to Education is a national non-profit organization founded in 1987 by George Weiss, who built his wealth as a hedge fund manager [22]. Initially, Weiss emulated Eugene Lang's *I Have a Dream* initiative, promising a class of sixth-grade students in a Philadelphia elementary school a free college education. Weiss named the project in response to the famous "Say No to Drugs" campaign of the 1980s—his alternative for students was to "Say Yes to Education." Weiss brought his model to cohorts of students in other cities, including a partnership with the Harlem Children's Zone in New York. Say Yes differed from most philanthropist-driven tuition guarantee initiatives because it provided wrap-around support services to help students prepare themselves to take advantage of the promise.

In 2008, Say Yes launched its first citywide initiative in Syracuse, NY. Instead of sponsoring a cohort of sixth-grade students in a school or across a district, the new model was to build the capacity for the city to cover the cost of postsecondary education for every graduate of the Syracuse school district. This version of the Say Yes to Education strategy was announced only three years after the city of Kalamazoo, Michigan, launched the Kalamazoo Promise [23]. The shift from individual efforts of private philanthropy to the collective action of an entire city shifted the purpose from unique postsecondary opportunity to local and regional economic development. To secure the support of local business, civic, education, and philanthropic leaders, the strategy was linked to leveraging an educated workforce to catalyze economic growth for the city and the region. Kitchens [24] described how the Kalamazoo Promise was one of five distinct strategies designed to grow the local economy, recognizing that in a knowledge economy, a college-educated workforce is a necessary first step to growing the local economy.

Local leaders in Buffalo were following the evolution of the promise community models and considered the Kalamazoo approach but chose to partner with Say Yes to Education, mainly because the model included both the tuition guarantee and a comprehensive approach to supporting students and families throughout the journey from kindergarten through the attainment of a college degree. The Syracuse chapter of Say Yes to Education focused on reforming the local school district [25] and relied heavily on the Chancellor of Syracuse University to accomplish its postsecondary objectives. The university and community partnership became a cornerstone of the model and continued to be the case when Say Yes announced its partnership in Buffalo.

Say Yes to Education Buffalo is organized as a collective impact strategy for social change, where the focus is on developing a broad partnership of local leaders who can set a shared agenda, engage in mutually reinforcing activities, utilize data to examine the collective effects of the work, and support continuous communications among critical stakeholders. A central feature of successful collective impact strategies is the existence of a backbone organization whose sole responsibility is to manage the shared agenda for the partnership [26,27]. As Kania and Kramer (2013) noted, the backbone organization is critical because every other stakeholder has its agenda and cannot easily take on the priorities of the collective when the plans may not overlap.

The tuition guarantee is the most prominent feature of the Say Yes to Education collective impact strategy. However, as George Weiss and others realized, financial resources are necessary but insufficient to ensure students can take advantage of promise programs. To illustrate, in 1999, the Detroit Pistons won the National Basketball Association (NBA) championship, and in response, the Detroit News published and sold commemorative programs to the fans of Detroit. The Detroit News used the proceeds to sponsor a free college education for sixth-grade students in a local middle school. In 2005, the News ran a story following the classroom of students they sponsored six years earlier. Of the 20 students in the class, five could no longer be located, and only two were planning to attend college in the fall—in short, only 10% of students were prepared to take advantage of the promise with no other resources or support to help them along the way.

Say Yes to Education provides a generous tuition guarantee, but their support does not stop with the scholarship. They include access to health clinics, a legal clinic, access to mental health support, individual social workers placed in every school to address the emergent needs of students and their families, parent resource centers in schools staffed by college navigators, and robust campus-based support for students who make the transition to the local colleges which educate the most BPS graduates. Additionally, Say Yes provides leadership on an array of additional supports typically provided by the school district, including extended learning programs after school and on weekends, peer mentoring, and a program called Breaking Barriers, designed to support boys and men of color in the schools and the local community. One additional wraparound service provided as part of the Say Yes to Education model is the focus of this study—the FAFSA Completion Project [28].

The work of Say Yes, even from the earliest stages of its organization, reflected the tenets of the human capabilities framework (St. John, above). While Say Yes—Buffalo was not meeting families' complete subsistence needs with organizational resources, they partnered with schools and other community-based organizations to improve postsecondary opportunities for low-income families. Over time, the organization evolved to pay more specific attention to students' postsecondary pathways into college and careers, providing information to students and families about the process and creating sustainable networks to support postsecondary participation and success. The collective impact model that shaped their citywide initiatives is consistent with the community support networks designed to address various family needs, prepare students for college, and provide the resources the community needs to help students navigate the transitions into and through college.
