Lift All Boats works with schools to build great leaders now and the systems to build great leaders in perpetuity.
If every school a student goes to has an abundance of strong leaders, that student can reach their full potential, prepared for a life of opportunity and the college and career of their choice.
THE PROBLEM SCHOOLS FACE
Schools face a shortage of prepared leaders, which limits student achievement and their capacity to expand or open new seats.
Growth and expansion, for new schools and existing networks alike, requires a bench of leaders capable of maintaining excellence at scale.
Without a leadership pipeline, schools and networks are one departure away from instability.
The student and adult culture that drives outcomes requires skilled, aligned leaders spread throughout a school.
Lift All Boats transforms schools through sustainable leadership pipeline development.
OUR PROGRAM
Participants learn skills they can apply immediately and receive support in teaching these skills to other leaders and emerging leaders.
LAB’s standard offering is an 18-month program that directly develops 15-25 leaders, impacts dozens more, and leaves partners with fully operational, self-sustaining internal leadership development pipelines.
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MONTHLY LEADERSHIP WORKSHOPS
LAB delivers five, four-hour monthly workshops, teaching participants immediately applicable, best-practice-based leadership skills.
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“When you go to a PD, you always wonder if it will be something you can use immediately. These sessions always gave me something I could use on the car ride home.” - Charlie DePietro, Principal of Mildred Osborne Charter School
“Thanks again for the caring way you bring people through this thoughtful curriculum and give us a platform for raising the bar for excellence at CCS.” - Julie Lause, Chief of Schools, Crescent City Schools
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"TURNKEYING" TO EXPAND IMPACT
LAB supports each participant in “turnkeying”--teaching the session they just received to 6-10 other leaders or emerging leaders, vastly expanding impact and training essentially all your leaders at once.
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After receiving a turnkey session from their leaders (and never interacting directly with LAB), emerging leaders have said:
“This session influenced me to become more self aware.”
“This session encouraged me to give the same compassion to my colleagues that I give to my students.”
“This is the session I need to help me in all areas of my life.”
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DESIGN A SELF-SUSTAINING PROGRAM
The program culminates in a two-day Design Retreat, where you will design self-sustaining internal leadership development programs, followed by six months of LAB coaching to support the launch and implementation of those programs.
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Current participants are already launching new programs, including:
Leadership academies that develop cohorts of future leaders
Regular leadership summits that ensure skill development and alignment
Apprenticeships to prepare talent for critical roles (school leader, instructional leader, etc)
Lift All Boats began working with three pilot networks in Fall 2024, and each network has been able to put our content into action immediately. Even at this stage of the program, our partners are showing encouraging signs of progress.
CURRENT RESULTS
Crescent City Schools identified a shortage of candidates for current and future open leadership roles as a threat to their mission. With LAB’s support, CCS designed and is already implementing network leadership programs that will create a bench of qualified candidates for any open leadership position, including:
A cross-school leadership academy–modeled on LAB’s workshops–to train potential leaders.
School-based leadership apprenticeships to provide immersive training in mid-level leadership to high-performing teammates in entry-level roles.
Edward Hynes Charter School Parkview identified top-to-bottom alignment and clarity of expectations as a major contributing factor to underperformance, particularly from new teammates who struggled to implement the Hynes model and thrive in Hynes’s culture once they came on board. They wanted to increase planned retention in order to improve instruction and student results over time.
Hynes leaders have already started clarifying expectations for open roles, using stories and examples from current high performers to force candidates to actively choose whether or not to commit to the most difficult parts of the job. Hynes learned this technique at a LAB session and implemented it at a hiring fair the next day.
Hynes is using their Design Retreat to plan ways to make the “Hynes Way” easier to communicate and teach to all teammates, including concrete, role-specific behaviors and expectations that lead to success. With LAB support, they are going to cascade this vision throughout every school, starting with top-level leaders, then mid-level leaders, and finally to every teammate through summer orientation and regular re-orientation.
“Our team reported that learning about [the content] was a great use of their time and that it helped shift their mindset about how to best support and encourage adult alignment!”
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100% of participating principals and CEOs have used skills learned in LAB to improve their hiring processes.
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100% of participating leaders have used leadership skills learned at LAB to solve problems and support other adults.
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97% of participating leaders have used LAB techniques to improve their emotional intelligence.
The Team
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Because of his success as an entrepreneur and nonprofit leader, Ben is a nationally sought-after leadership consultant and executive coach in the education, nonprofit, and private sector. His clients include finance and tech startups, philanthropies, charter school networks, and design firms. Ben is a champion of growth.
Ben is the founder and former CEO of Collegiate Academies, a network of innovative public high schools in New Orleans and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, serving 3,500 of the most disadvantaged children in our nation. Collegiate Academies’ student populations have some of the highest rates of poverty, disability, incarceration, and academic deficit in the state. Many enter the ninth grade on a fourth-grade level or lower in both reading and math. Yet, after over a decade of developing and utilizing a set of proven tools, over 90 percent of Collegiate Academies students earn college admission. Ben’s work alongside Collegiate Academies has won him various awards and recognition, including accolades from the Accelerate Institute, The Oprah Winfrey Show, and multiple “Best Places to Work” prize committees.
Most recently, Ben has founded Lift All Boats, which transforms schools through sustainable leadership pipeline development. Lift All Boats teaches an organization's leaders immediately applicable skills, skills which they then spread to their own emerging leaders. The LAB curriculum is based on content that Ben developed and delivered over more than a decade of successful leadership and leader coaching.
Ben holds a B.A. from Yale University and an Ed.M. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Before founding Collegiate Academies, Ben taught middle school and high school in New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Boston. He has served on the faculties of New Leaders, Leading Educators, Future Leaders in the United Kingdom, and the Relay Graduate School of Education. Ben has been a fellow at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation, Achievement First's Charter Network Accelerator, the Pahara-Aspen Institute, Cambiar Education, and the Broad Academy.
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Aidan believes that great leadership and great teaching can be taught, and he has over 15 years of experience helping teachers and leaders to grow into the best versions of themselves. As the Chief Academic Officer of Collegiate Academies, Aidan helped lead a network of five high schools and two postsecondary programs through post-pandemic reopening, all while building teams with the mindsets and skills to serve all students. Under Aidan’s leadership, Collegiate increased graduation rates, postsecondary enrollment rates, and the percentage of students scoring proficient or higher on state exams. Aidan also led the large-scale adoption and implementation of high-quality curriculum and a huge expansion in dual enrollment classes, ensuring that all students had access to rigor and opportunity.
Aidan has a bachelor's degree from Harvard University and a master's degree from Relay Graduate School of Education. In addition to serving as a teacher, school-based leader and district leader at Collegiate Academies, Aidan was an assistant professor of practice at Relay GSE, and got his start teaching math at an alternative school as a Teach For America corps member.
As Director of Lift All Boats, Aidan helps organizations accelerate their outcomes and transform their culture through customized, comprehensive leadership development programming. Lift All Boats teaches an organization's leaders immediately applicable skills, skills which they then spread to their own emerging leaders. You'll find Aidan facilitating workshops, coaching leaders, and guiding potential partners through every stage of their relationship with Lift All Boats.