What Ecosystem Stewards Know That System Leaders Don’t — Yet

By Karen Pittman and Merita Irby

Learning ecosystems may be found anywhere. But it takes careful stewardship to help them thrive.

That sentence, borrowed from our friends at Remake Learning, is the one we keep coming back to. We spent the better part of the past year interviewing the founders and leaders of four mature, purpose-built ecosystem intermediaries — CommunityShare, the PAST Foundation, the Providence After School Alliance, and Heart of Oregon Corps. We went in looking for lessons. What we found was something closer to a revelation about what it actually means to steward a learning ecosystem, and how different that is from leading a system.

Leadership and Stewardship Are Not the Same Thing

In our work, we draw a clear line between system leadership and ecosystem stewardship. System leaders focus on vision, direction, and decision-making — guiding organizations toward defined goals.  Stewards do something different. Their focus is on adaptive management, sustainability, and care. Where leadership drives change within a system, stewardship responds to changes across an ecosystem– acting to introduce small changes to create or sustain growth and balance.

Most system leaders are acutely aware of the ecosystem resources and risks outside of their control. Many are working hard to translate the principles of ecosystem stewardship into their systems — changing policies, priorities, and practices to encourage risk-taking, collaboration, and agency. But these changes are especially difficult in systems governed by rigid, tightly interconnected operating rules.

Well-managed ecosystems may look more like organized chaos — “a situation that appears disordered and chaotic on the surface but actually has an underlying order or structure.” That approach leads to greater adaptability, collaborative decision-making, innovation, and trust. Trust, in our experience, is the critical first ingredient. Without it, ecosystem actors — young people, family members, educators, learning partners — will not have the freedom and guidance needed to continue to adapt, collaborate, and innovate.

This is why learning from organizations purpose-built for ecosystem stewardship matters.

The Essential Elements: Trust, Time, and Idea Translation

After extensive interviews, three elements kept surfacing as prerequisites for everything else: trust, time, and idea translation.

The seeds of these intermediaries’ ideas were planted two to ten years before their nonprofit organizations were incorporated. Founders attribute their long-term success to this upfront investment. They prioritized time — not timelines — to brainstorm and problem-solve with diverse stakeholders, to listen, and to find the right words to translate complex ideas into accessible plain-speak before codifying organizational goals and strategies. This care with words shows up in their taglines, their websites, and the way they talk about their work.

Trust, Time, and Idea Translation are the essential elements of ecosystem leadership that, once in place, allow intermediaries to authentically co-develop and adapt tools, trainings, and technologies — working collectively to identify and address shared problems and, in so doing, sustaining their value-added stewardship roles with their ecosystem partners.

What Are Ecosystem Intermediaries?

Most communities have one or more nonprofit intermediaries — an out-of-school time network, a children’s collaborative, a provider coalition — that coordinate training, funding, advocacy, or planning for their members. The role of a mature ecosystem intermediary, however, is broader.

Effective learning ecosystem intermediaries focus on improving the design and availability of learning experiences and pathways across systems and throughout the community. They actively work to partner with educators and community organizations to expand access. They commit to ensuring that teens farthest from opportunity are future-ready. And they design tools, technologies, and trainings that can be packaged for use by others — part of larger networks that support knowledge transfer across learning systems.

They are careful to ensure they are adding value to the learning landscape rather than competing in it.

What the Stewards Taught Us

Each of the four organizations we profiled had a different starting point, reflecting their leaders’ personal strengths and their community’s particular conditions and opportunities. But they shared a philosophy.

CommunityShare emboldened teachers to develop community-facing projects by matching them with community experts — building a “human library” that brings meaning to school courses and creates bonds beyond the school building and school day. Heart of Oregon Corps engages 16-24-year-olds directly, challenging those sidelined by public systems to work, learn, earn, and lead — creating a model rooted in belonging and real work where youth leaving the justice system, navigating poverty, or recoiling from school failure join work crews to build confidence, skills, connections, and pre-apprenticeship credentials while responding to real community problems.

The founders of all four nonprofits articulate a vision for stewarding an integrated learning ecosystem in which all youth and young adults find pathways to success that wind through and draw upon the full set of assets in their communities — bridging across the systems of education, youth development, and workforce development. They have all sought to do so through deep collaboration and trust-building with a diverse range of partners.

Four Suggestions for Aspiring Stewards

For those interested in becoming ecosystem stewards — or building organizations to do this work — here is what we learned.

1. Don’t rush to create a formal organization. Allow time for listening, translating, and trust-building. Each of these leaders took the time needed — sometimes years — to forge ideas from deep, authentic conversations before codifying organizational goals and strategies.
2. When ready, create a flexible structure outside of — or insulated from — the operational constraints of K-12 or other public systems. Key to their acceptance as stewards was their ecosystem partners’ trust that they were adding value that could attract more resources rather than competing for funding. That trust allowed stewards to help partners shift from scarcity to abundance mindsets.
3. Stay focused on optimizing learner experiences as the best path to improved learner outcomes. These leaders defined success as increases in the quantity, variety, and accessibility of high-quality learning experiences for all learners — not just those enrolled in a particular school or program. Their strategies targeted different population groups and neighborhoods initially, but their sights were always set on solutions that could scale.
4. Design tools, trainings, and technologies to improve connections, not control actions. They were iterative, adaptive, and nimble. They were not afraid to change or take risks and were honest about naming mistakes. Over time, their ecosystem partners came to value these traits — and to turn to them for solutions to shared challenges.

The Invitation

Together, we can co-imagine a future of learning supported by a nimble civic infrastructure that ensures equitable access to powerful pathways that help every young person thrive. The goal is not rebuilding individual systems. It is scaffolding across systems and settings — co-creating community-wide, year-round, credit-bearing learning experiences and career pathways for youth and young adults: 360° | 365 | Up to Age 25.

Ecosystem stewardship and system leadership require different mindsets, skill sets, strategies, and structures. Both are needed. But one is much better understood than the other. It is time to change that.

Karen Pittman and Merita Irby are co-founders of Knowledge to Power Catalysts and managing partners of the Alliance for Youth Thriving. This post draws from Learning Ecosystem Intermediaries: Cultivating Connections Across Systems & Ecosystems to Help Youth Thrive, co-authored with Merita Irby and commissioned by Remake Learning (January 2026).