In a beautifully poetic note Katherine Bradley, co-founder of the CityBridge Foundation and executive chair of CityBridge Education, announces that Mieka Wick is leaving her position as chief executive officer of the nonprofit organization.  The following letter is reprinted with Mrs. Bradley’s permission.

June 28, 2018

Dear CityBridge Colleagues and Friends,

Although the core of my message is not news for most of you, this writing may bring surprise for some. So I thought I would start with the headline: After ten wonderful years as my partner and colleague at CityBridge, Mieka Wick will be departing at the end of June. She leaves us without having fixed a next destination, instead hoping to explore multiple pathways for her future life and professional contribution. Leadership departures are never easy, but this one deserves an unusual moment of gratitude, as the CityBridge team and I thank Mieka for the exceptional decade we have had together. Mieka has been nothing short of a treasure—as a person of deep warmth and compassion, and as a critical leader through the growth and development of CityBridge.

Eleven years ago this summer, I hired Mieka Wick based on one, fateful phone conversation. She was considering a move to Washington with her husband David and her newborn, Annabelle. (Sam Wick arrived a few years later.) It was time for her to be back in her hometown, closer to her family. She had built the donor relations practice area at New Profit in Boston and was looking for some way to continue that special blend of education and philanthropy. I was looking for someone to be my close partner in building what we have come to call our Stewardship Network—a collection of leaders in philanthropy, business, and civic life who, together, could ensure that the education reform platform being built in Washington would remain resilient and strong. I had seen glimmers of similar networks in other cities, and my hunch was that CityBridge could help create the “glue” that would allow Washington, D.C. to avoid the political whiplash plaguing education reform efforts in other cities.

Mieka joined us in September 2007. Together, she and I met with countless local leaders and champions, and our Stewardship Network thrived. In December 2010, I asked her to take on the role of CityBridge executive director, and to my delight and good fortune, she accepted. In January 2017, we launched a new venture, CityBridge Education, entirely focused on the incubation of innovative school models and the redesign of existing schools. Mieka became CEO of that enterprise, which is now finishing a first (successful) full fiscal year as a public charity.

She leaves us now in order to have the time and space to craft a whole new chapter—tethered surely to the non-profit purposes that have animated her career, namely, work that allows children, families, and individuals to thrive. We know that whatever she touches—whichever lucky entity it is she creates or attaches to next—will have the full magic of the Mieka Wick we have all known and loved.

After a decade of close partnership, there are hundreds of moments and images I could turn to, to sum up her unique gifts: moments when I have had the privilege of watching her masterfully present our work to individuals or to large audiences; and many moments of triumph—schools succeeding, programs launched, partnerships formed. Her most profound impact, however, is not in any tally of external achievement, as significant as that success is. Instead, her deepest impact is on all of us, her close-in colleagues at CityBridge and her wider network of stewards and friends. Mieka is an individual of unsurpassed warmth and positive energy, compassion and delight. As with any human endeavor, it is these moments—the friendships, alliances, and loyalties we build—that most endure. And in that sense, Mieka Wick will never really leave us. Sometimes, long after an individual has moved on, a trace of them remains in the air, like the scent of a signature perfume, lingering and distinct. Mieka’s signature—that thing that will linger in the air at CityBridge—is her deep humanity and the care, warmth and affirmation she consistently brought to others. Hers has been a presence of love, and CityBridge has been immeasurably blessed by it.

Although we hope to have news on the appointment of her successor by early in the fall, I will save all of those practical points for future writing. Mieka’s personal email is: mieka.wick@gmail.com. I know she will want to stay in touch with the friends and colleagues she has from CityBridge. For today’s writing, however, my purpose is simply to say: Thank you, Mieka Wick.

With best wishes,

Katherine Bradley
Executive Chair
CityBridge Education

Last evening my wife Michele and I had the great privilege of heading over to the Columbia Heights Educational Campus auditorium to watch the first public showing of the film Breakthrough.  The event was co-sponsored by CityBridge Education and Stone Soup Films, the firm that produced the movie.  During the introduction we learned that Stone Soup is a Washington, D.C. company that develops all of its projects through the use of volunteers.  I would say this is just about the perfect organization to make a documentary that covers D.C.’s charter schools, a movement composed of hundreds of people contributing their time, money, and expertise for no financial remuneration.

The documentary follows three schools that were awarded $100,000 each through Citybridge’s “Breakthrough Schools: DC” challenge in 2014 to create new or redesigned transformational schools in the nation’s capital.  This was the initial year that these grants were made and Monument Academy PCS, Washington Leadership Academy PCS, and the Wheatley Education Campus were part of the first cohort of six winners.

So here’s the bottom line.  I basically watched the last 20 years of my life replayed before me on the big screen.  The audience saw Monument Academy, the first boarding school in the city for foster children, go through the amazingly complex struggle of securing a permanent facility.  The commercial spaces that were identified as possibilities all fall through and the charter is eventually awarded, with the help of Building Hope, a shuttered DCPS building, the former Gibbs School.  I went through similar hunts with Cesar Chavez PCS for Public Policy, the William E. Doar, Jr. PCS for the Performing Arts (now City Arts and Prep PCS) and Washington Latin PCS.  But the structure was in such a poor physical condition that Monument must practically rebuild it from the ground up, a repeat of what Washington Latin went through at its own expense when it assumed the old Rudolph Elementary.

We get a first-hand look at a Monument Academy parent information session held at a public library, since this is before the school had its own location that would allow it to hold meetings of this type. The picture captures the exceptionally tough questions and comments by those considering sending their own offspring to this new school.   Michele and I witnessed exactly the same scenario when we were trying to convince parents to sent their kids to WEDJ.

Breakthrough took the large audience for a closeup view of the charter approval process for Washington Leadership Academy before the DC Public Charter School Board.  I remember this as if it was yesterday as I observed and wrote about Seth Andrew’s team making a confusing and unstructured presentation one year; only to be followed by a revised application 12 months later that perfectly reflected the exciting vision for this groundbreaking charter that won unanimous approval by the board to begin operating.

The film is an accurate portrayal so it does not have a completely happy ending.  The Wheatley Elementary School’s attempts to implement a blended learning approach based upon competency-based student assessments.  During its first year of implementation only three classrooms end up adopting this new approach which results in its dynamic instructional leader for this effort, Tanisha Dixon, leaving the school at the end of the term.  It brought back in my mind the high all of us associated William E. Doar experienced when in our first couple of years we met the Annual Yearly Progress goals under No Child Left Behind only to find much later the three founding women departing and the hiring of Ten Square consulting group to get the school back on track academically.

All of this brings me to my final impression of the film.  This heroic work that many of us in this town have been doing to finally close the achievement gap is really really hard.  Thank goodness we have CityBridge Education, with Katherine Bradley as the fountainhead and Mieka Wick as chief executive officer, to provide financial assistance and many other avenues of support as public school reform reaches an entirely new level.  The organization’s goal is to create 25 new or reconstituted schools in the next five years.  I can’t wait to see the sequel.

The exciting news came out yesterday that the CityBridge Foundation, transitioning as of January 1, 2017 to become the nonprofit CityBridge Education, will begin incubating and creating new schools and revolutionizing already exciting ones in alliance with the traditional and charter school sectors.  The organization’s aggressive goal is to “redesign or launch 25 innovative public schools within five years” in Washington, D.C. with the mission of “advancing equity and opportunity for all children.”

CityBridge Foundation co-founder, president, and personal hero Katherine Bradley has turned to recently named chief executive officer Mieka Wick to lead this charge.  I’ve worked with Ms. Wick for years at the CityBridge Foundation and frankly with her in this new role I have no doubt that success is the only possible outcome.

The effort is a natural outgrowth of the work of the foundation.  It has been providing financial and other support to promising charter and DCPS schools since its creation in 1994.  A list of partner schools can be found here.  In fact, Ms. Bradley was co-chair of the search committee that led to Kaya Henderson becoming chancellor.  Since 2013, CityBridge has been managing the awarding of grants to new or redesigned schools as part of Breakthrough Schools: D.C. modeled after the national Next Generation Learning Challenges competition.

It is also a natural outcome of the fact that here in the nation’s capital after 20 years of public school reform only 25 percent of students are scoring as college or career ready on the PARCC standardized examination.

So how will the group’s efforts become a reality?  From Wednesday’s press release:

“CityBridge Education will find teachers, leaders, and school teams with the ideas and the drive to create new, better models of school. Educators will be connected to structured design work, portfolio management, networks of talent, and the significant resources needed to launch or transform schools. We will build a cross-sector (district and charter) cohort of educators, regularly sharing their experiences (successes, as well as failures) in order to speed adoption of promising practices and transformative ideas. Our work will serve these innovative educators, all united in the belief that school can deliver results that honor the talent and potential inherent in children.”

There is one fundamental principle that will guide these efforts, and that is best explained by Ms. Wick:

“Although we expect a real diversity of schools in our portfolio, there is one principle animating all our school creation work: Our unifying imperative is equity. For far too long, schoolchildren in D.C. and other urban areas have been subject to a “narrative of disinheritance”—the persistent inequities of experience, resources, and perceived worth, based on race, class, or story. Great schools can disrupt and redirect that narrative. When designed thoughtfully, schools can be places where students—regardless of race or socioeconomic status—are secure, valued, and can stretch for significant accomplishment; they are places where love and justice thrive. Equitable schools always deliver academic results, but they do so in a way that develops in students key habits of autonomy, mastery, and independent thought. Only then, with schools that foster authentic human agency, can we say we have achieved our goal of intentional equity.”

It’s going to be an extremely interesting 60 months.