Managing Director, Investment and Impact Lead Allana Jackson discusses the synergies between Blue Meridian’s nationwide scaling and place-based approaches, her personal history and professional experience which connects her to the mission, and how social sector leaders who ‘fall in love with the problem’ are successful at scaling solutions.
At Blue Meridian, we invest in both place-based partnerships and nationwide scaling. Why are these two approaches important for boosting economic mobility?
We believe that life outcomes are improved when the resources that support people’s socioeconomic mobility exist within the places they live. Folks fare much better when their communities have a continuum of support services that help them reach key milestones from cradle to career. I see Blue Meridian’s investments in place-based work as a way of ensuring this network of support exists in places where it will be most beneficial; that the experience for people is continuous, opportunities build on one another, and their needs are met at the right time.
Blue Meridian also invests to scale promising strategies nationally, sometimes with tweaks or customization to address local needs. If solutions that work exist, individual communities shouldn’t have to build their own from the ground up. That’s why we support successful strategies to reach more people in more places across the US. Additionally, national organizations can be integrated into local continuums of care or can help add capacity to the regional partners they collaborate with. In this way, these two core pillars of Blue Meridian’s investing approach—nationwide scaling and investments in place—complement each other.
Some of Blue Meridian’s Nationwide Solutions investments are integrated into Place Matters place-based partnerships. Can you share an example of how this works in practice?
Two examples come to mind, both of which are organizations scaling nationally but also working in Oklahoma in connection with the Birth through Eight Strategy for Tulsa or “BEST,” which aims to disrupt the cycle of intergenerational poverty through family and child services. The first is Healthy Steps, which aspires to transform pediatric practice for children aged zero to three. As a part of the BEST support network, Tulsa children are able to receive preventative treatment at a HealthySteps clinic, setting them on a trajectory for healthy development.
The second example, which may seem less likely but feels powerful to me, is the Center for Employment Opportunities (CEO), an organization Blue Meridian is supporting in its efforts to scale nationally.
CEO’s work connecting people returning from prison with jobs began in New York, and they expanded to Oklahoma – their first additional location – in 2011. CEO has observed and learned from Oklahoma’s local dynamics, such as the fact that there is a higher rate of incarceration for women than in most US states. As a result, I’ve witnessed CEO tailor their approach to meet the unique needs of women who are reentering society, including partnering with local organizations so that the combination of immediate employment from CEO and other wraparound supports enable women to re-establish connections with their children and provide a sense of stability for their families.
At the same time, CEO is adding to the local landscape. For example, CEO’s innovation to unlock a federal funding stream that can be used to support reentry work is benefiting local organizations. Since most small, community-based nonprofits don’t have the in-house capabilities to navigate the complexities of applying for and reporting against federal funding streams, CEO—acting as an intermediary so local organizations can access capital– is able to provide that capacity.
Through this symbiotic relationship, CEO is both expanding the reach of high-quality reentry supports and adding capacity to local communities.
At Blue Meridian, we seek to increase economic and social mobility for American young people and families. How does your personal history connect you to this work?
My family story is a mobility story. My grandmother on my dad’s side grew up quite impoverished in an agricultural community in North Florida, and she moved north to New York to try to create a new future for herself and her first child. She was very successful in creating the future she dreamed of because she is an incredibly persistent, creative, and resourceful person. Still, there was luck involved. I believe that if we—as a country—want to live into the promise of the American dream, people shouldn’t have to be either lucky or be superstars to access and benefit from opportunity.
Place also plays an important role in my story. After relocating from Florida, my grandmother was very intentional about moving from Harlem to the suburbs of New York, even though she wasn’t welcomed there as a Black woman, which proved challenging. She persevered in an unfriendly environment because she knew how important it was for her kids to be in a community with a set of services, civil dynamics, and a level of safety that would provide them with future opportunity. Reflecting on my grandmother’s decision helped me recognize how important it is to bring resources into communities so that people seeking opportunity don’t have to leave home to find it.
Finally, many of the strategies we invest in at Blue Meridian have components that made my family’s mobility story possible. For example, both of my grandmothers were able to benefit from training programs which led to high-quality careers that offered opportunities for growth. Today, I’m grateful for the combination of social service organizations and government services that supported my family’s mobility, and I work to make sure similar opportunities are available for all families.
Through your time at The Bridgespan Group and now in your seat leading investment work at Blue Meridian Partners, you have worked to transform life trajectories for about a decade. What professional experiences motivate you to continue to pursue this mission?
I am incredibly proud and privileged to have been a part of Blue Meridian’s story for so long. To know that I have played some part in key innovations and expansions to our investment model that are vital for achieving our long-term goals means a lot to me.
While at The Bridgespan Group, I helped Blue Meridian develop and launch both the Justice and Mobility Fund and the Place Matters portfolio. But my longstanding involvement in the Studio has been particularly fulfilling and educational. I’ve been involved in every set of investments through The Studio @ Blue Meridian since it launched in 2019, at a time when supporting pipeline building and funding preparation for scaling was a newer idea for the sector. In that work, I partnered with organizations on the cusp of breakthroughs in scale, which was particularly motivating. I witnessed several of them —including the nonprofit, Grameen America and the nationwide Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program—leverage the opportunity provided by The Studio to iterate on their approach and overcome barriers to scale, leading to subsequent investments from Blue Meridian which allowed them to reach more people. Bearing witness to this journey has inspired me to double down on helping organizations translate bold visions into scalable models. I’m committed to continuing this work—supporting leaders who are driving systemic change and helping them unlock the capital and strategic clarity needed to go further, faster.
Additionally, I really appreciate the supportive nature of The Studio’s process—Blue Meridian staff and strategic partners work directly with each organization’s leadership team as they experiment and iterate over two years. The relationships born from that work continue to thrive long after. I am personally still in touch with organizations long after their participation in The Studio, and being able to serve as an informal advisor or sounding board brings me real joy.
In your experience advising social sector leaders on growth strategy and implementation, have you seen any commonalities between organizations that find a successful path to scale?
It’s important to understand that almost no one gets it right out of the gate, nor should they be expected to. As a social sector leader, you have expertise and a hypothesis, but there are always factors you aren’t aware of or can predict—especially in an ever-changing environment. So, I think a commonality for successful social sector leaders is the mindset to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. If leaders stay focused on the problem, they can recognize its dimensions, what’s helping to alleviate it, and what barriers remain. This way, leaders are constantly innovating, learning from their experience, evolving their solution, and chipping away at the problem over time. This is true whether that leader is focusing on a highly complex, but local problem impacting an entire region or a national problem affecting a specific population of people. I appreciate that Blue Meridian is open to and supportive of innovation and experimentation, as I see these as essential components to reaching scale for any solution that aims to improve the life trajectories of millions of people.
If Blue Meridian Partners was successful beyond your wildest dreams, what would impact look like?
What we’re trying to do at Blue Meridian Partners is invest to create population-level changes in mobility. We envision a country where kids are likely to do better than their parents—we hope that if parents have not reached the middle class, then their children have the opportunity to reach middle class by middle age. Additionally, we’re investing to close gaps across different geographies and improve outcomes for populations regardless of zip code. So, in my wildest dreams, Blue Meridian’s impact would look like increased access to opportunity for families in dozens of communities across the US. And that impact would be created by place-based work that weaves different strategies together and nationwide solutions landing in those places in really effective ways.
To create this type of impact, I think we also have to ensure that people believe two things. First, that the kind of change we seek to achieve is possible. Second, that everyone deserves opportunity. To get the engagement we need to scale solutions that work to meet the scale of problem, people must have hope and optimism in the possibility of opportunity.