Cities for Education Entrepreneurship

Who We Are

CEE-Trust is a national non-profit dedicated to helping cities ensure that every child has access to high-quality public schools. We work with a growing network of city-based non-profits and foundations that are leading efforts to dramatically improve public education in their cities. We call the Members of our network ‘harbormasters’ for education. To seafarers, harbormasters bring order to what would otherwise be a chaotic and perilous space by directing navigation and ensuring efficient operation of harbors. Likewise, our Members serve a similar role for education in their cities – they build and coordinate the activities of their education ecosystems in an effort to grow high-quality public schools.

Our ultimate goal is to ensure that all cities have high-impact harbormasters that are, in turn, rapidly growing the number of high-quality public schools.

What We Do

CEE-Trust functions as both a convener and consultant: we engage our Members through network and working group events, and we provide consulting support to build harbormaster capacity by leveraging national best practices and lessons learned.

Convening and Collaborating: We convene the network to help foster relationships between our Members and to collectively develop bold, new ideas and strategies.

Developing the Capacity of Harbormasters: We offer consulting support to our Members to help them align their strategies and practices to grow high-quality public schools.

Developing Transformation Plans: We work with a few cities each year to develop customized citywide school system transformation plans.

Sharing Research, Publications and Communications: We serve as a voice of the city-based education reform sector - publishing on topics related to our city ecosystem evaluations and system redesign projects.