Steward Stories: How Big Thought Turned Compelling Questions Into a Citywide Learning System

By Merita Irby and Karen Pittman 

Our “Steward Stories” series captures lessons learned from interviews with leaders of mature, purpose-built ecosystem intermediaries. An ecosystem steward is a boundary-spanning leader who goes beyond traditional out-of-school time (OST) system building to weave together the diverse people, places, and possibilities that shape a young person’s daily life. Rather than managing a single isolated network, stewards collaborate across K-12 schools, youth development programs, and workforce systems to build vibrant, equitable learning ecosystems. They drive systemic change from practice to policy by creating purpose-built intermediaries, developing scalable cross-system training tools, and championing “Future Features” of learning. These core priorities include promoting learner agency, institutionalizing “unwalled” schools that connect community resources to formal education, broadening the definition of educators to include informal mentors, and normalizing pathways for students to receive school credit or credentials for out-of-school learning.

Big Thought began in 1987 by two civic leaders who saw the need to bring the arts and cultural performances into schools at a time when they were being eliminated from public school curricula. Buoyed by their success, they looked for ways to bring arts education into the community and continued tackling other opportunity gaps like civic engagement, summer learning and alternative education redesign, creating hands-on “direct to youth” afterschool and year-round learning experiences that can be diffused throughout the community.

Today, direct youth programming includes arts and creative learning opportunities for youth ages 4-24, equipping them with practical skills and meaningful connections. To expand access to similar opportunities, Big Thought’s Learning Systems Initiative unites community organizations in a collaborative network that amplifies its impact. As Erin Offord, Big Thought’s president and CEO, notes: 

“The time is now to ensure every young person can create, thrive, and shape their own future. Big Thought’s journey has always been about expanding what’s possible, from arts education, to creative learning across communities, to helping young people connect their strengths and passions to meaningful career pathways. By building lasting relationships, shared infrastructure, and strong learning ecosystems, we help communities meet the evolving needs of young people.”  

Founded in 1987, Big Thought was led by Gigi Antoni from 1990 through 2017, who described Big Thought’s purpose in this way.

“It’s in out-of-school time that kids get to pursue their interests. Using the imagination is a very important skill. It helps kids become adaptable as they figure out new ways to respond to change. Imagination is the way you choose a career path. It is, in fact, the missing link [in education].”

She also described Big Thought’s role: “We are a link,” she said in 2017, weeks before leaving to scale that same philosophy at the Wallace Foundation. “We work to collect, link and distribute learning opportunities to the kids who need it most.”

Byron Sanders, who succeeded her as CEO from 2018 to 2024, put his own words to what carried forward: “We dug deep in our strategy to see what was the elemental through line… What we realized is that at its crux, we specialized in creating experiences that allowed young people to build the skills, build the muscles that allowed that greatness to shine through, that otherwise don’t get a lot of space to breathe in traditional school and education spaces.”

Dallas City of Learning (DCoL) was launched in partnership with the city and the school district to respond to a big question: could a distributed network of community-based experiences deliver the cumulative engagement needed to achieve similar outcomes? Big Thought’s breakthrough idea: dosage matters, but it doesn’t have to be achieved in a single organization. Scale high-quality learning experiences through an ecosystem approach that activates libraries, cultural institutions, museums, parks, nonprofits and schools.

DCoL’s scaling success is based on a network of 100+ partners participating in Big Thought’s Learning Systems Initiative, delivering coding, arts, STEM, theater and other short- and long-format experiences co-designed with youth and participating in quality improvement supports.

Youth and families select from diverse free or low-cost offerings across neighborhoods and transportation lines that fit their interests and schedules. The majority of participants are from historically underserved communities. DCoL participants have higher GPAs, standardized test scores, and attendance than non-participants.

A decade later, that bet has become the backbone of Big Thought’s identity as one of the country’s most sophisticated learning-ecosystem intermediaries: a network that has engaged more than 480,000 youth in 15,000+ learning experiences since 2014, spanning 1,516 partner organizations, 45 of them for 10+ years.

Can You Measure the Health of a Learning Ecosystem? Yes!

Ask Mary Miller, who runs Excellence by Design Education Center, why Big Thought’s badging system mattered enough to build her curriculum around, and she doesn’t point to test scores: “You’re going to have something to show for your work that’s going to be recognized.” Her students leave the program with digital portfolios, badges alongside their best work, mapped to the same five Creator Archetype domains DCoL tracks citywide: Academics & Artistry, Digital Fluency, Civics & Service, Social & Emotional Foundations, Design Thinking. Since Big Thought’s Learning Pathways Initiative launched in 2019, approximately 500 youth across the network have, combined, earned over 1,000 badges – each one portable, verifiable, and theirs to keep.

At most organizations, a moment like that, a young person completing a project, a facilitator making a judgment call about what they demonstrated, stays right there. At Big Thought, it doesn’t. Data collected at one level often informs action at another, and the same badge decision that credits one student rolls up to a city-wide perspective to ask which learners across Dallas are developing which skills this year, which programs are strongest at building them, which organizations are issuing the most aligned badges, and which competency domains are weakest citywide.

That multi-level architecture exists because Big Thought’s own account of its measurement journey is blunt about what it was really doing: “We didn’t build a platform. We kept asking questions.” Every framework, survey, dashboard, badge, and data-sharing agreement exists to answer one of five questions, asked again at every level, from one child up to the whole city: Are opportunities accessible? Are young people receiving sufficient dosage? Are experiences high quality? Are competencies becoming visible? Are pathways becoming navigable?

SMU’s Center on Research and Evaluation (CORE) put a number on that last, hardest-to-answer question: every additional 10 days of programming has an impact on outcomes. Dosage, it turns out, is not an abstraction. It’s something you can actually see, citywide, once you’ve built the infrastructure to look.

A STUDENT’S VOICE

KJ Hudson, 17, on what the ecosystem looks like from the inside: “I’ve always been very artistic… Big Thought has helped me take my authenticity and then channel it in ways that other people can receive it. I hear about the bygone times when everyone knew everyone else in their community. But for me, Big Thought is the neighborhood.” (Youth Today, June 2025)

Erin Offord & Greg MacPherson — A Dynamic Duo of Stewards

Big Thought has had a lot of stewards. Today it’s Erin Offord and Greg MacPherson – both Big Thought veterans themselves. As Greg notes, “We began with a belief that arts would be a powerful tool in helping children,” he said in 2016, describing not his own hire but Big Thought’s founding nearly three decades earlier, “the organization grew to serve children, teachers, and parents in more ways than our founders could have imagined.”

Erin joined Big Thought in 2001, when the organization was still mostly an afterschool arts program; Greg joined in 2010, four years before Dallas City of Learning existed. Between them, they were in the building for the entire pivot from a single organization running programs to a citywide ecosystem coordinating hundreds of them, and they stayed for everything that came after: Learning Pathways, the Creator Archetype, the Opportunity Youth Incubator, One Door. Today, as CEO and Chief of Staff, respectively, they’re a dynamic duo of stewards who combine Erin’s roots in family and community engagement with Greg’s fifteen-year obsession with ensuring young people really get what they need to make a difference – i.e., understanding measurement and dosage from the kid all the way up to city-wide.

Offord is a New Orleans native whose parents modeled service before she knew the word for it –  her father a Vietnam veteran, her mother a fixture at United Way of New Orleans. “I felt like I was home,” she said of her first days at Big Thought, in a role built around infusing art into community life. Roughly ten job titles later, she frames her tenure the same way: “I put my anchor here. It’s my life’s work because there were always new iterations of what questions we were trying to ask.”

MacPherson, meanwhile, isn’t a former artist-cum-administrator. His creative craft is still very present. A theatre major out of Baylor and an early ensemble member of Dallas’s Second Thought Theatre, he comes from a family of teachers, and he’s spent fifteen years chasing one specific, stubbornly hard question: “How much exposure to creative thinking and self-discovery is really necessary to change a person’s life?” he asked in 2025. “If we could confirm that amount, that would be a game-changer.”

Big Thought Timeline

Forging Connections

1987 — Founded in Dallas as a regional Young Audiences chapter, the focus was on bringing arts and cultural programming into schools at a time when arts funding was being cut from public school curricula.

1994–1997 — The first public/private partnerships take root: Creative Solutions with the Dallas County Juvenile Department, then Learning Partners (originally ArtsPartners), a citywide agreement connecting every Dallas ISD elementary school and teacher to arts and cultural resources, 150 schools, 80,000 students.

2004 — The organization renames itself Big Thought to reflect an expanded vision beyond arts education alone.

Strengthening Connections

2006–2013 — The Thriving Minds Arts Learning Initiative builds community-wide capacity for integrated arts learning, spurring 140 new district arts and music specialist positions and Dallas ISD’s first weekly arts-instruction policy since 1978. 

2011–2012 — Dallas ISD and Big Thought build a new model for elementary summer school, which is selected in 2012 to join the Wallace Foundation’s National Summer Learning Project, a multi-year demonstration researched by the RAND Corporation.

2014 & 2016 — RAND publishes Learning from Summer and Getting to Work on Summer Learning, documenting the finding that reshapes Big Thought’s strategy: dosage matters, how much high-quality learning time a child receives predicts outcomes more than access alone.

Sustaining Connections

2014 — In direct response to the dosage-matters finding, Big Thought partners with Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings to launch Dallas City of Learning (DCoL) as part of the MacArthur Foundation’s national Cities of Learning initiative, a citywide, distributed learning ecosystem rather than one larger program.

2015 — Dallas ISD formally joins the DCoL partnership.  

2016–2021 — Dallas, through Big Thought, Dallas ISD, Dallas Afterschool, and Dallas Park and Recreation, is selected as one of six U.S. communities for the Wallace Foundation’s Partnerships for Social and Emotional Learning Initiative (PSELI), known internally as SEL Dallas, a six-year, RAND-researched study on aligning in-school and out-of-school SEL practice.

2017 — As SMU’s Center on Research and Evaluation (CORE) begins an independent, ongoing partnership evaluating DCoL outcomes.

2024 — DCoL marks a decade of citywide impact: more than 480,000 youth engaged in 15,000+ learning experiences since 2014.

Scaling Connections

2023–2024 — A 33-organization pilot Local Opportunity Youth Community of Practice scales into a 50+ organization National Opportunity Youth Incubator. (deck only — no public link found)

2024 — Erin Offord, a 20-year Big Thought veteran, becomes CEO, succeeding Byron Sanders and capping a two-year internal succession process.

2025 — SMU CORE publishes a longitudinal, seven-year analysis of DCoL student outcomes; Big Thought releases the BTI Brief synthesizing a decade of ecosystem evidence for national replication.

2026 — Big Thought begins building One Door, All Access, a unified platform integrating Learning Partners, DCoL, and the Opportunity Youth Incubator under a single learner-facing pathway.