Social Impact

Uplift Education

Designing a Human Capital strategy

Introduction

Uplift Education is the largest public charter-school network in North Texas. Started in 1996 with just one school, Uplift now serves over 19,000  students in pre-k through 12th grade at forty schools on twenty campuses across the Dallas-Fort Worth area, with an annual budget over $150 million. With a focus on providing free, college-preparatory education in communities that lack access to high-quality public education (over 70 percent of the students are on free or reduced lunches), Uplift schools have consistently had a 100 percent college acceptance rate for several years, with 64 percent being first-generation college attendees.

 

There are lots of great initiatives that came out of Oliver Wyman’s work that will help us have stronger human capital to support our scholars. Thank you to the Oliver Wyman team for making us a better organization
Yasmin Bhatia, CEO, Uplift Education

Scope

Over the course of three months, Oliver Wyman worked with Uplift’s CEO and People & Innovation Team in building out the team’s leadership development strategy and supporting several of its key initiatives, including leadership training, performance management, and talent procurement and staffing. Our team worked closely with the organization’s CPIO (Chief People and Innovation Officer) and her Senior Directors to define and communicate progress on critical initiatives. Together, they then developed processes and tools for Uplift’s team to build out end-state training and performance management operations.

Working with Uplift Education provided the Dallas office with the opportunity to impact the local education system and connect further with the greater Dallas community. We worked closely with them to deliver real impact across many of their critical initiatives, and we achieved significant impact for Uplift's leaders together
Tim Hoyland, Partner, Oliver Wyman

Impact

Working closely with the Uplift team, Oliver Wyman was able to help develop a new human capital strategy. Our partnership helped the team plan timing and priority of people development initiatives for the next two years and laid the groundwork to build their leadership development and performance management programs. We also created detailed processes and tools for the Uplift team to use as they execute strategic initiatives.

It was a great experience getting to work with the People team at Uplift Education. I really enjoyed learning about the organization and the project was an amazing opportunity to apply my consulting toolkit in a unique way to support a local nonprofit. As a Dallas native, it was a very humbling experience helping this passionate group further its goal of bringing higher-quality education to my community
Niraj Parekh, Senior Consultant