The authors’ observations draw from an 18-month pilot during which they leveraged the Institute’s social capital playbook to provide direct support to a group of three intermediary organizations–Education Strategy Group, Generation Schools Network, and Hawai‘i P-20–collectively supporting 20 sites in the K-12 career pathways space. During the course of the pilot, researchers sought to understand how schools and nonprofits can make social capital building an explicit, effective, and equitable component of existing career-connected learning models.
Schools and programs that are interested in expanding students’ networks can consider 10 lessons learned from the pilot:
1. Stick with relationship outcomes: Use relationship data to develop goals and measure progress.
2. Audit your current practices: Look for untapped opportunities to strengthen students’ social capital within existing career-connected activities.
3. Prepare to build, not just buy: Given scarce off-the-shelf curricula, allocate time and resources for social capital training and curriculum development.
4. Honor relational norms and values: Adapt your approaches to both culture and context.
5. Incorporate immersive experiences: Pair social capital concepts with practice and opportunities to build real-world relationships.
6. Skills and access both matter: To seed positive interactions, develop communication skills alongside access to relationships.
7. Prime employers to share their social capital: Shifting employee volunteers’ mindsets can orient them to build relationships and share resources.
8. Source social capital across your enterprise: Individual social capital is a critical, but limited, lever for scale.
9. Embed social capital into systems: Enthusiastic practitioners foster change, but infrastructure maintains it.
10. Benchmark collective progress: Communities of practice build practitioner confidence.
Equipped with these lessons, educators can build models that embed both career know-how and know-who into students’ journeys, further expanding their access to opportunity.
Related:
Are you measuring students’ social capital? You should be
5 on-ramps to building students’ social capital
- Children learn best on paper: We need better technology, not less of it - July 13, 2026
- In districts, reaching readiness, retention, and success - March 5, 2026
- AI use is on the rise, but is guidance keeping pace? - January 2, 2026