Building an education coalition around children and young people
How can schools, families, nonprofits, public agencies, and local professionals work more effectively together around the needs of children and young people? This is the ambition behind France’s Cités éducatives: to strengthen local education coalitions and create greater continuity of support, from early childhood through the transition to employment. Since June 2026, Fondation Altitudes has been working alongside the Paris 18 Cité éducative to help strengthen this collective effort and develop more coherent, place-based responses to the needs of children and young people.
Place-Based Collaboration
Systems Approach
Collective Action
Cité éducative
Education Pathways
A place-based education coalition
Launched in 2022, the Cité éducative Paris 18 is one of the largest in Paris. It brings together 29 elementary and primary schools and three middle schools across four priority neighborhoods in Paris’s 18th arrondissement.
The initiative brings together the many people and organizations that shape children’s and young people’s lives — schools, national and city agencies, nonprofits, health professionals, career and education guidance organizations, and families — around a shared ambition: better connecting their efforts to create more coherent educational pathways.
Its governance brings together the French Ministry of Education, the national government’s local administration, and the City of Paris, with the Ligue de l’enseignement providing day-to-day coordination.
In a community with such a wealth of organizations, initiatives, and resources, the challenge is not necessarily to create more programs.
It is to better understand needs, build a shared vision, connect stakeholders, and focus collective efforts on the interventions that can make a decisive difference in a child’s journey.
This is the approach behind Fondation Altitudes’ partnership with the Paris 18 Cité éducative.
Our role includes supporting the local coordinating team through:
- analyzing needs and educational pathways, to better identify critical moments and gaps;
- connecting and aligning stakeholders, to enable more coordinated responses;
- identifying and mobilizing additional partners and resources around the territory’s priorities.
For Fondation Altitudes, Paris’s 18th arrondissement is an especially valuable learning ground. An education ecosystem is complex: understanding its stakeholders, interactions, resources, and gaps takes time. We therefore approach this work with humility, moving step by step: observe, experiment, learn, and adapt.
How do we build and sustain a shared ambition among stakeholders with different responsibilities, priorities, and timelines? How do we maintain a common direction amid multiple needs and constant demands? How do we make coherent choices and act collectively when no single organization holds all the levers? How can interventions be better connected around a child’s journey? And how do we address the “last mile” barriers that can prevent an effective solution from actually reaching the children and families it is intended to serve?
Together with the Cité éducative team, we are exploring how to progressively strengthen the territory’s backbone capacity: developing and sharing a common understanding of the system, facilitating collaboration across stakeholders, making better use of data to inform decisions, and designing pathways around the lived experiences of children, young people, and families.
This approach is being put into practice through several concrete initiatives, including education and career pathways and school-family engagement, allowing us to test and refine these methods in the field.
We also draw inspiration from approaches developed elsewhere, including StriveTogether and its collective impact approach.
Our ambition is to strengthen the territory’s collective capacity to act, while developing methods and lessons that can be useful beyond Paris’s 18th arrondissement.
Cités éducatives in France
Launched in 2019, France’s Cités éducatives are a national place-based initiative designed to strengthen educational continuity for children and young people in underserved neighborhoods, from early childhood through the transition to higher education and employment.
They bring together schools, public agencies, local governments, nonprofits, families, and other community stakeholders to work more coherently across the different stages and dimensions of a young person’s development.
After several years of implementation, the French Court of Accounts has highlighted the value of this approach while also identifying several conditions needed to strengthen its impact — particularly stronger implementation capacity, governance, and evaluation.
This is precisely where philanthropy can provide complementary resources: creating the time and capacity to experiment, strengthen implementation, measure results, learn, and document what works — without replacing the role of government.
For Fondation Altitudes, this experience reinforces a broader conviction: philanthropy can support individual solutions, but it can also invest in a system’s capacity to work better as a whole — helping develop and test practices that, when proven effective, can ultimately be adopted and scaled more broadly through public systems.
Other collectives
Fondation Altitudes is under the aegis
of Fondation Caritas France
of Fondation Caritas France