Five Lessons from Leading Change at a College Success Organization

DC CAP had a breakthrough year in 2025.

We're a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit focused on college access and success for low-income, first-generation students. We combine multi-year scholarships with intensive coaching and strong university partnerships to address the financial, academic, and personal barriers that cause students to stop out. Our goal is to get students through college with minimal debt, prepared to compete and thrive in their hometown.

At our most established university partnerships, 75-95% of scholars earned their degrees. For context, about 37% of D.C. students who enter college earn a degree within six years. Nationally, fewer than half of low-income students do. Over 85% of last year's University Partner Scholars returned to campus in Fall 2025, with seven partnership cohorts achieving 100% retention. In our Ward 7&8 program, where we had struggled with persistence, intensive changes nearly doubled our retention rate in a single year.

Behind the scenes, we reduced success coaches' administrative time by over 50%, freeing dramatically more capacity for coaching, programming, and relationship-building. We welcomed three new local university partners. We made hard calls to realign our partnership portfolio. And we received an extraordinary gift from Mackenzie Scott and Yield Giving, a validation of both our mission and execution.

I spent the holiday season reflecting on how we got here. I put together some thoughts and hope they can be helpful. Nothing here is specific to the field of college success, but I tried to speak to specific contextual details that were particularly relevant for each theme.

1. Start with a committed team and be transparent about what change requires.

This work is hard, dynamic, and not always predictable. There are lots of sprints and few periods of down time. Saying otherwise helps no one and harms both progress toward goals and trust within your team. We sought to be as transparent as possible about where we were, what needed to change, the organizational risks we faced, and what we thought it would take to get where we wanted to go.

We refer to our shop as an older nonprofit with a startup culture. Not everyone wants that, and we respect people enough to be clear about what it will take to build what we need to build for our scholars and our city.

When our leadership team faced unexpected turnover during our busiest operational period, the team absorbed new responsibilities without missing a beat. Scholarships went out on time. Retention rates held. That only happens when people know the mission and are bought in before the crisis hits. The team we have today knows the stakes, knows what is required, and is on board for it. That feels great to say, but even better to know when things get tough.

2. Implement and refine relentlessly.

Most of us have experiences working at organizations that couldn't do anything until the path ahead was crystal clear and the execution plan felt perfect. While ideal, this is unlikely to happen, particularly in fast-paced organizations like ours. What made 2025 possible for us was a willingness to build processes to solve problems now, then revisit them and refine as needed.

In our Ward 7&8 program, we had tried a lighter-touch coaching model. Persistence rates were stuck at 38%. We shifted to intensive coaching: regular campus visits, cohort meetings, 1:1 sessions, and coordinated problem-solving with partners through ongoing communication and data sharing. First-year scholars and those facing academic roadblocks get more intensive engagement because they're at higher risk for stop-out. Persistence nearly doubled to 72% in one year.

We applied this same iterate-and-improve mindset to our scholar matching process, which was a tremendous improvement but perhaps too complex for its purposes. We did this with our streamlined disbursement process, which we found had one too many steps after a semester of implementation. It's not about being perfect at first; it's about always getting better and being honest about what still needs to improve.

3. Build a trusting culture and co-create goals and processes.

Many organizations do their research, strategic positioning, and goal setting in exclusive settings, revealing the results only when everything is complete. Too often, the result is a lack of connection to the actual work, a lack of clarity for the people accountable for implementation, and a resulting lack of ownership and trust.

While far from perfect (see lesson 2), we have sought to build our strategy on what our scholars, partners, and staff are telling us. Scholars told us they wanted to stay closer to home. That insight drove our Mid-Atlantic localization strategy. We onboarded three new regional partners in 2025, and our partnership pipeline now reflects where scholars actually want to be. We learned from partners and staff that careers are increasingly the focus of scholars' questions and anxieties. We learned from staff that several application requirements were onerous for scholars and unnecessary for awarding scholarships.

Now our strategic pillars reflect direct advocacy from everyone responsible for carrying them out. My foremost goal is maximizing this in 2026.

4. Assess, disagree, and reflect in the context of evidence.

This seems obvious but can get lost in change management, particularly when personal preferences, external pressures, and a fast pace threaten our thinking. Deciding what is important to you, and then how you can measure that, is critical. Once you know which needle you are trying to move, you can have clear conversations about the value of the things you are doing.

We defined success around scholar preferences, retention and graduation outcomes, and partnership collaboration quality. When we evaluated our portfolio against these criteria, the path forward became clear. We realigned our partnerships to concentrate in the Mid-Atlantic region, where scholars want to be, with institutions that demonstrate engaged leadership and strong cross-departmental communication. Seven partners achieved 100% retention this year. The portfolio is more focused and dramatically stronger.

You can't do everything. Even if you could, you certainly could not do everything well.

5. Nothing good happens overnight.

The changes reported above happened throughout 2025. We started the work to understand what needed to change back in 2023. If someone looked then, no progress was visible on the outside. A year later, very little was visible.

The data infrastructure we built in 2023 made it possible to see the Ward 7&8 problem clearly. The partnership evaluation framework we developed in 2024 gave us the evidence to make portfolio decisions in 2025. Each invisible investment compounded.

If you're leading change at an organization, a team, or your own work, be fair to yourself. Progress takes time to show. My colleagues often remind me to celebrate the small, procedural, seemingly inconsequential wins. The new processes. The habit changes. The feedback that taught you something. That's all positive and trends toward something better. Keep showing up. Little things compound and behaviors are visible far faster than outcomes.

None of this is revolutionary, but it reinforces a loop we have seen from watching successful organizations. Assemble a team committed to success and to growth and improvement along the way. Build a culture of co-creation and shared accountability. Relentlessly reflect and refine as you build and grow. Ground this reflection and resulting refinement in evidence instead of intuition, expediency, or preference. The result is stronger outcomes, or at least clear direction as to why you didn't get what you were after in the first place and how to move forward.

Please let me know what you learned this year. I'm always looking to improve our internal models and realize there's a ton to gain from looking outward for such learning.