Who We Are

Starting in 2019, the present TLI staff and contributors embarked on a “journey of exploration”. We were seeking to identify critical issues and factors affecting educators and their efforts to expand opportunities for student success. In particular, we were interested in exploring the importance of education – business/community partnership development, and how these efforts could be improved and sustained.

TLI’s journey-of-exploration involved its founders and partners in a variety of discovery projects, including the following:

•  A proof-of-concept initiative involving JGT Initiatives – a Pittsburgh-based education/business consulting firm – and Transformative Leadership Academy (TLA) – an independent school in West Texas. This project was part of an education/business partnership development pilot effort to test the effectiveness of the program’s methodologies, concepts, and curriculum approaches. 
• An associated year-long qualitative and quantitative research study, concentrating on student outcomes and related performance elements, was conducted by the University of Texas Permian Basin College of Education.
• A virtual focus group project with a multi-state panel of CTE administrative, instructor, curriculum design, and support representatives, concentrating on evolving education partnership needs and issues.

In response to this initial research and findings, individuals from JGT Initiatives, the University of Texas Permian Basin, and the Transformative Leadership Academy collaborated and founded Transformative Learnings Initiatives (TLI), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit designed to help facilitate our engagements with education, business, and community entities.

You’ll also find that this eclectic mix of talent has resulted in an ongoing collaboration that integrates academic rigor with best practices from the worlds of education and business. The output is an evolving application framework of methodologies, concepts, and proven success factors that can be utilized by our clients in “real world” education settings.

The foundations of TLI's approach  are modeled on the business world concepts of Strategic Account Management, a process at the organizational level that focuses on building and sustaining long-term, mutually beneficial relationships between an organization and its key customers. Included in this approach are simple but powerful communication, outreach, and associated support tools to help further facilitate the education-community-business partnership development process. The entire Education-to-Business Networking© program structure of proven business relationship building tools, methodologies, and concepts are adapted for use by education service providers and institutions.