Reflections from 2025: Commitment and Impact Through Core Values
There’s a popular meme from the last few years that captures a universal feeling for many of us in equity-focused work: “The horrors persist, but so do I.”
We’ve been balancing that duality all year. EduDream is a Latina-founded, women-owned small business dedicated to education equity with a team of women, mostly women of color. As an organization, we have sustained wins this year that are worthy of celebration. Continuing to be here, to deliver, to evolve within a political climate that is decidedly against our entire ethos is arguably the biggest win of all. We deserve celebration, joy, and rest along with so many others.
That said, it’s difficult to overstate the pervasive hypernormalization of 2025, and it’s irresponsible to write a year-end recap without deeply acknowledging the year’s horrors. Our colleagues have done phenomenal yet sobering work synthesizing the anti-democratic attacks on equity in education, why organizational data strategy is more important than ever, and the cyclical battle for equity-centered research. And our operations lens can’t help but filter these trends, analyze their effects on organizational strategy, and share the real-world impacts on our firm. Our already-lean team is now smaller; we cut in-person community-building, adjusted work schedules, creatively conserved resources, and still showed up for our clients and partners. Behind the scenes, we brainstormed, pivoted, and grieved collectively and individually. Simply put, this has been an extremely difficult year. The horrors persist, but so do we.
In reflecting on this year’s challenges, the consistent glimmer of hope has been our team’s commitment to EduDream’s core values even amidst the unprecedented. These values provide a compass for decision-making and inform how we show up for one another and our clients each day. It’s pretty easy to act in alignment with your values in the best of times; the true test comes when challenges arise. Below are some of the ways our values have shown up across the team and in our client partnerships this year, exemplifying the “EduDream Way” and caring for one another as we move the work forward.
Equity + Justice
The value: We are committed to furthering equity and justice for all students through culturally-responsive and equitable (CRE) phases of work and partnerships, centering the assets and voices of those most impacted by structures of oppression.
The commitment: Living into CRE principles is not a checkbox or a brief acknowledgment once a research or evaluation project begins. It requires embedding these principles into day-to-day work and intentionally shifting power to those closest to and most impacted by the work. To do this, our team builds in time for reflection, feedback, and adjustments at every stage of the research process.
The impact: This year, EduDream launched a partnership with STRIVE, a national workforce development organization, to evaluate the impact of a trauma-informed mental health and wellness initiative. We’ve incorporated STRIVE’s feedback throughout the project, ensuring our approach is responsive to the needs of STRIVE’s adult population, many of whom experience systemic barriers to employment, such as long-term unemployment, housing insecurity, limited education, histories of trauma, or interactions with the legal system. We adapted our data collection instruments for relevance and accessibility, and designed a data collection timeline that reflects the realities of nonprofit program operations. We look forward to engaging STRIVE’s adult population, generating actionable insights, and contributing to the broader field of workforce development strategies that make a difference for vulnerable populations.
Results + Impact
The value: We deliver actionable data, innovative solutions and practical tools that impact policies, teaching, and learning so that every student is supported, actively engaged, and prepared to learn to their full potential.
The commitment: Our clients in the nonprofit space often do not have in-house research or evaluation support (part of why they might seek us out), so how can we leverage our expertise in a way that is inclusive, responsive to a community’s needs, and creates practical results?
The impact: This is EduDream’s third year supporting early childhood collaboratives across Illinois through a five-year partnership with Illinois Action for Children. This partnership provides research and analysis support free of charge to selected collaboratives. This year, EduDream supported the Plano Area Alliance Supporting Student Success (PAASSS) and co-facilitated a learning session with schools, district offices, public health centers, and research organizations within the region. We also supported Addison Partners for Play, Learning, and Education (APPLE) and created a fact sheet to be distributed across their service area. Both partnerships yielded actionable data and practical tools for immediate implementation to impact early learners and communities.
Hope + Opportunity
The value: We believe in leveraging hope in our work against inequity, focusing our efforts on imagining possibilities and creating opportunities for long-term, systemic changes that benefit all students.
The commitment: This year’s funding cuts have impacted the education research sector and related organizations, including nonprofits focused on early childhood care and education, educator diversification, and postsecondary access and persistence. Our network is operating with limited financial resources, and we recognized a need to structure options for shorter engagements with more rapid results, continue clarifying language that communicates our work with minimal jargon, and provide upfront transparency about timeframes and costs.
The impact: This year, we formally launched a suite of Learning & Evaluation Solutions for Nonprofits. We created these signature offerings in direct response to the challenges we’ve seen organizations grapple with over the years, especially those exacerbated by the year’s antagonistic climate towards education, research, and evaluation. This brief document aims to clearly lay out typical organizational challenges, how EduDream can help, and what outcomes, timeframes, and starting costs nonprofits can expect from our solutions. Our hope is that nonprofits can use this information in their decision-making when considering external support – whether that’s our team or another firm.
Human-Centered Intentionality
The value: We respect our shared and individual lived experiences, resisting dominant and oppressive ways of working by prioritizing emotional intelligence, reflective collaboration with partners, intentional relationships across communities, and mindful timelines that disrupt notions of urgency.
The commitment: Individual productivity is not linear, caring for ourselves is non-negotiable, and everything occurring externally has the potential to impact how we each show up to work. Externally, we strive to apply these considerations to clients and communities, seeing both as partners in the research process.
The impact: A core part of our team culture is the flexibility to honor our human needs. Practically, this looks like the ability to flex hours for personal appointments, caretaking, or to align with bursts of productivity; setting reasonable deadlines to hold each other accountable without manufacturing urgency; and clear communication about individual capacity week-to-week so we can help each other out, as needed. We embrace tools that help us operationalize this value, like personal check-ins at the start of all 1-1s with supervisors, and Asana for all things project management, and have collectively committed to trying new things when needed.
Collaborative Leadership
The value: We value thought-partnership and collaboration with advocates, community members, students, and families as a leading organization in equity-centered research and strategy.
The commitment: Internally, we focus on coaching and elevating opportunities for each team member to step into leadership roles. We recognize each person’s skillset and the power of creating together to produce high-quality work. Externally, our relationships with partners and clients are highly relational – we seek to understand local contexts and community needs directly from those who are closest to the work and collaborate on solutions that are meaningful, sustainable, and devoid of ego.
The impact: This past year, EduDream supported three research teams through the K12 Research for Equity Hub, a multi-year actionable research initiative designed to generate evidence that informs national policy dialogue on accountability and assessment systems in K12 education. EduDream’s role was to provide thought partnership to the teams to ensure their research was clear, accessible, and equity-centered, and leverage our networks to further disseminate and amplify their findings.
Reflecting on the year through the lens of these examples is grounding. It affirms that strong organizational values and proactive investment in organizational culture are necessary work. As EduDream prepares to take our annual wellness week, our hope for 2026 is for more rest, joy, and abundance – for the communities we work with, the research sector, and ourselves.
We’ll be back in the new year to continue providing community-centered research, evaluation, and strategy. If you’re curious about how we can support your organization in 2026, we’d love to hear from you. Send us a message at info@edudream.org.
