Leadership Laboratory · Partner With Us

Your leaders already know what needs to change. Let's build it together .

The Leadership Laboratory is MCC's deepest partnership: a three-month engagement that surfaces what your leaders and staff are actually experiencing, shapes it into a curated innovation project your team believes in, and builds the funding pathway to carry the work out.

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A conversation, first. We will tell you honestly whether the Laboratory fits.

The problem we solve

Another initiative launches. Eighteen months later, nobody can find the binder. That is what a sustainability gap looks like.

You have probably watched it happen. A promising framework arrives with a kickoff and a slide deck. By spring, the language has faded from meetings, and by fall the initiative belongs to whoever remembers it.

The problem was never effort. It is where the plan came from, and whether anything was built to sustain it.

Initiatives chosen at a distance ask your team to carry someone else's idea, without the documentation, funding, and routines that carry work past a launch.

Sustainability is one of the Five Pillars of Lasting Change for exactly this reason.

Meanwhile, the real answers are sitting inside your system. Your principals, coaches, and teachers could tell you exactly why the last three initiatives stalled, if anyone asked them one at a time, in a conversation built for honesty.

The Laboratory exists to ask them, and to build what makes the answers last.

Why it works

Change holds when the plan comes from your people.

Decades of implementation research and MCC's own work alongside districts point at the same truth: teams carry out what they helped create.

When a project grows out of what your leaders and staff already believe is needed, you skip the hardest part of change management, which is convincing people to care about a plan they had no hand in.

That is the Laboratory's entire design. Listen first, rigorously. Shape the project together. Then fund it, so belief has resources behind it.

Book a Partnership Discovery Call

What the Laboratory is

Three months from leader insight to a fundable project your team is ready to run.

The Leadership Laboratory is a three-month partnership for districts, schools, nonprofits, and public-serving organizations. MCC embeds alongside your leadership to do the qualitative work most systems never have capacity for, then turns what we find into a curated innovation project with a funding pathway attached.

What's inside the engagement:

One-on-one interviews with your leaders and staff, so people say what they actually think instead of what the room expects

Leader-Learner Profiles for each participating leader: a companion to the resume that captures their background, needs, direction, and the change work they care about

Thematic analysis across every interview, held against your data and conditions, so findings reflect your whole system rather than the loudest voice

Collaborative design sessions where findings become a defined, manageable initiative with roles, routines, and documentation

A funding pathway, from local resources to state and foundation grants, built into a fundable, grant-ready proposal

Every engagement is scoped to your system through a proposal, so the Laboratory fits the size and shape of the organization it serves.

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Who this is for

Built for the leaders responsible for what lasts.

Laboratory partners are superintendents, directors of teaching and learning, and executive leaders of nonprofits and public-serving organizations. They tend to arrive carrying one of three things: an initiative that will not hold, a data or culture problem their team keeps circling, or a change they want to fund.

The Laboratory asks something of you, too. This work runs on candor. If your leadership is ready to hear what your people actually think and build from it, the Laboratory will serve you well. If the goal is validation for a decision already made, a lighter engagement is a better fit, and we will say so on the call.

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How We Work

Surface. Shape. Sustain.

The Laboratory moves through three phases, and inside each one the work runs on MCC's Rhythm of Practice: Reflect. Connect. Grow.

PHASE 1

Surface

We gather what your leaders, staff, and community are seeing through interviews, profiles, and honest reflection, and hold it against your data and conditions. This is where the real story of your system comes into view.

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PHASE 2

Shape

Together we design a curated innovation project: a clear, manageable initiative rooted in the Five Pillars of Lasting Change, with the roles, routines, and documentation to hold it. Your team is at the table for every design decision, which is exactly why they will carry it out.

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PHASE 3

Sustain

We build what makes the project last: the funding pathway aligned from local resources to state and foundation grants, a fundable, grant or research-ready proposal, and the documentation and routines that carry the work beyond any single award.

Results from the work

This is how a Minnesota district funded its next chapter.

In June 2026, South Central Service Cooperative was awarded a Minnesota Department of Education Innovation in Service Learning Grant for an initiative called Building Belonging Through Youth-Led Community Partnership. The project grew directly out of the partnership between SCSC and Making Champions of Change, and it runs on Reflect. Connect. Grow.

The work asks the questions this page has been describing: what helps people feel connected, what contributes to exclusion, and how trust can be strengthened across schools and communities. As the partnership took shape, it grew beyond its starting point, drawing in Minnesota New Country School, Le Sueur-Henderson Public Schools, and the Henderson Police Department.

Over a 10-week program, students work alongside educators and community partners through structured conversations, reflection, and collaborative learning, with students helping shape the dialogue itself. Their insights will become companion guides that help educators and community partners understand belonging, discipline, and relationship-building through a student lens: practical tools built to outlast the project, which is the point.

One partnership. One shared read on what the community needed. A state-funded project with sustainability designed in.

Read the SCSC Announcement

What you'll walk away with

A project your team owns, with the resources to act.

By the end of the Laboratory, you hold three things most districts never get from an outside partner:

A shared, honest read on your system.

What your people are experiencing, in their own words, analyzed with rigor. Leaders tell us this alone changes how their teams talk to each other.

A curated innovation project your team believes in.

Defined, manageable, and rooted in the Five Pillars, with the roles and routines to hold it. Your people designed it, so your people will run it.

An innovation project built to be resourced.

The proposal works whether the right fuel is a grant, your district's own investment, or a funded research partnership. The pathway is mapped either way, so the project is ready to move the moment you are.

Common questions

"We have surveyed our staff before. How is this different?"

Surveys collect answers to your questions. One-on-one interviews with thematic analysis surface the questions you did not know to ask. People also say things in a private conversation they will never type into a form.

"How much time does this ask of my team?"

Interviews run one-on-one and are scheduled around your people's real calendars. Design sessions involve your leadership team at defined points. The heavy lifting of analysis, documentation, and proposal-building sits with MCC.

"What if the findings are uncomfortable?"

Sometimes they are, and that is usually where the project is hiding. Findings come to you first, framed for action rather than blame, and the design phase turns them into something your team builds toward.

"What does it cost?"

Every Laboratory is scoped to the system it serves, so the engagement is proposal-based. The Discovery Call is where we learn your context and follow up with a proposal matched to it.

Start the Conversation

Bring us what your leaders are seeing.

Laboratory partnerships begin with a conversation about your system, your people, and what feels stuck. You will leave the call with a clear read on whether the Laboratory fits, and if a lighter path serves you better, we will point you to it.