What Does It Take to Make Systemic Change in Education?

In 2017, Brent Malicote, the associate superintendent at the Sacramento County Office of Education (SCOE), asked superintendent Dave Gordon for $35,000 to try something small. The plan was simple: bring Sacramento educators together for a community of practice on social-emotional learning (SEL). He didn’t know if anyone would show up, but the free event quickly maxed out its 80-person capacity. Leaders crowded in, eager to talk about how to build schools where students and adults could actually thrive.

That enthusiasm wasn’t just a good sign; it was evidence of an untapped potential across the state for a different kind of professional learning, one rooted in relationships and trust instead of compliance and checklists. It reiterated Malicote’s belief that systemic change rarely begins with sweeping legislation or polished blueprints. More often, it starts with a small invitation that lands at exactly the right time.

The next fall, they hosted another free gathering for 130 people. This time it wasn’t just Sacramento County showing interest, but across the state, with teams joining together from Lake Tahoe, San Diego, Ventura, and Humboldt County.

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What grew from these gatherings eventually became the CalHOPE Community of Practice (CoP), a $120 million statewide initiative now reaching 56 of California’s 58 counties. Along the way, it has turned into a case study in what real change takes: unlikely partnerships, messy beginnings, and a willingness to invest in community and capacity rather than control.

“People really resonated with the idea that it wasn’t SCOE trying to talk to them as the expert,” Malicote says. “We wanted to just bring people together to learn, to network, to share best practices around social-emotional learning.”

Responding to crisis with connection

Malicote’s goal was to leverage the expertise of the leaders and the county offices of education across the state of California so that they could support SEL in all the schools and districts they were serving through the CoP model.

In this model, SEL was positioned as an addition to student mental health services, not as a replacement. At a time when educators were suddenly placed in the unique position of being frontline responders to a global pandemic, supporting not only student well-being but also educator well-being became a central concern.

To do this work, Malicote applied for a $6 million grant being offered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to think about how to bring kids back to school after the COVID-19 pandemic in a way that would support their development and mental health.

The funding came in and in January 2021, the first FEMA-funded CalHOPE CoP was held. CalHOPE was working to answer the questions that were brewing amid an extreme crisis: What could be done for schools? How could we help teachers? How could we help parents who are employed and have to work remotely? What stress and anxiety were they feeling in this new world at the time?

“That’s where we started to work, to create tools that teachers could use because they were incredibly stressed, as well,” says Jim Kooler from the California Department of Health Care Services, who helped connect Malicote with the grant. “If we didn’t take care of the caretakers, the whole system was going to crumble.”

Collaboration becomes the engine for change

As CalHOPE began to grow, more sectors and organizations were brought together to help enact this systemic change. The Greater Good Science Center was tasked with creating online modules that would train individuals at the county offices of education in different components of SEL.

The goal was for educators to take the modules and make them their own, adapting them to fit their diverse teaching and learning contexts. Additionally, the modules were designed for individual education professionals throughout California who were not necessarily associated with a county office of education to receive SEL training. These modules are still available to California educators today.

Most of the modules focused on different SEL topics, including cultivating safety and belonging in classrooms and schools, addressing trauma, understanding racial equity, integrating SEL into the academic curriculum, and bolstering family and community engagement.

Over the course of six months, six CoPs were held virtually utilizing the SEL modules created by the Greater Good Science Center. Additionally, Greater Good in Education also published a self-paced mini-course on the Basics of SEL that was made available to educators in California. Adding to that work, UC Berkeley developed a three-credit graduate-level online SEL Foundations course, made available to California educators for free through the UC Berkeley Extension program.

Mai Xi Lee, the social emotional learning director at SCOE, was at the forefront of helping bring the sectors of health, science, and education together.

“While SCOE has been the lead organization or the lead entity, it’s definitely been a collaborative cross-sector movement,” Lee says. “It’s about having the right champions, the right time, and just jumping in and trying different things and pulling people together.”

The vision of learning, networking, and sharing best practices together proved to be widely successful. Despite the initial resistance from FEMA in funding these CoPs, after the six-month contract expired, they came back and offered another $6 million to keep the program going.

Monthly statewide CoP meetings with the county offices of education became foundational to CalHOPE. These meetings created a space for county leaders to share questions, successes, and lessons learned, helping them troubleshoot challenges and build on what was working across the state.

By August 2021, nearly 6,000 educational leaders in California had participated in a regional CoP meeting or CalHOPE Student Support, the targeted disaster response program within schools statewide. Additionally, website visits to the Greater Good in Education collection of evidence-informed SEL practices more than doubled in California.

“CalHOPE grew from that grassroots, boots-on-the-ground effort,” Kooler says. “To change and reduce the stigma around feeling bad. Our very basic message was that it was OK to not be OK, and it was OK to get help. If we could help people just get over that initial sense. We believe that the entire population needed that kind of message.”

The success of CalHOPE and its supporting programs were recognized by the Department of Health Care Services with a $45 million investment by the state that allowed the partnered work between health care and education to continue through June 2024.

From county networks to classrooms

The early success of CalHOPE demonstrated what was possible at scale. Thousands of leaders engaged, statewide attention on SEL, and new investments from the state to sustain the work. While the county-level networks and resources were critical, the question of what this work would look like in schools, in real time, remained. 

To answer that, CalHOPE introduced a focal school model. Each county office of education partnered with local districts to select a handful of schools to receive more direct, hands-on support—training, coaching, and resources—so they could model effective practices in real time, test what worked, and refine systems that could then be scaled across districts and counties.

In terms of infrastructure and resources, the districts, counties, and schools all varied significantly in their capacity for SEL implementation, but the goal of CalHOPE Student Support was to meet them where they were and build from there.

Christobelle Tan, a transformative SEL project specialist with the Whole Child and Community Design Department at San Diego County Office of Education, worked with three focal schools during her time as a facilitator.

“One of them thrived because they had a really good teacher group, which led the SEL movement,” Tan says. “So, no matter what principal came in and out, they still continue doing it, and they’re still doing great work. The other two had leadership changes nonstop.”

For people like Tan, who were brought into schools to help enact change, there is only so much that can be done if there isn’t momentum from the people in charge.

“Obviously, the school that’s thriving right now is because of the teachers group that’s in there, and they are able to impact their school, but they’re not able to impact the whole district,” Tan says. “That’s where systems change is a little bit messy, is the decision making power. [Change] could happen in all schools, but if the leaders say no, they don’t want help, well, we can’t help them.”

Despite the difficulties encountered in ensuring these changes could remain effective and last, there was an awareness that progress looks different across sites. The goal was not to arrive at the same destination at the same pace, but to move forward together.

For Mountain View Middle School, a focal school with about 320 students in Redding, California, school counselor Marlena Witherell says they wanted to improve staff culture and focus heavily on supporting the mental health of their educators. To help facilitate this process, Kelly Rizzi, director of school and district support at the Shasta County Office of Education, met with Witherell, Mountain View’s grade-level teams, teachers, and their administrator to discuss how best to support the students and staff.

“We went into it open-minded, and we’re always willing to try new things,” Witherell says. “It really was just having conversations about what staff needed for their mental and physical well-being, but then also looking at what can we do for the students.”

They were able to revamp their staff room to include massage chairs and dividers to create a calmer, more relaxing environment. To help with staff mindfulness and well-being, they offered after-school yoga classes.

“It made the staff feel more supported,” Witherell says. “Then eventually, you know, the money ran out.”

Although the funding is no longer there, Witherell says the overall culture at Mountain View feels more positive and supportive. The staff checks in on each other, and they continue to have tough conversations about what needs to be done to ensure every staff member and student feels secure and able to do their best work. 


The power of community

While these changes were happening at the school level in person, the CalHOPE CoPs were still happening virtually for educators.

The modules created by the Greater Good Science Center’s education team continued to be brought to life through skilled facilitation. The specialized CoPs targeted groups such as after-school educators, school mental health professionals, parent educators, and classified staff who often don’t have access to professional development courses.

Salina Mae Espinosa, one of the lead facilitators of the online CoPs, recalls how important it was to create a space where people felt seen, supported, and able to experiment together in the middle of so much upheaval. She saw firsthand the impact that these CoPs had on overwhelmed and burned-out educators.

“I think post-COVID, there was a lot of new awareness that our teachers and students both needed more explicit tools to navigate stress,” Espinosa says. “I felt really excited to get to teach adults social-emotional learning so that they can show up as their best selves at work.”

Although these communities of practice were taking place online and many of the educators had never met each other in person, there was a true sense of community, due in part to the facilitation and the educators who were dedicated to showing up for the betterment of themselves and their work.

Extending the work beyond schools

By this point, CalHOPE had established strong roots in schools across the state, but leaders also recognized that children’s well-being doesn’t stop at the school gates. While much of the early momentum for CalHOPE was centered in schools and county offices, a second wave of work began to emerge: supporting parents and families.

To bridge the gap between schools and families, Maryam Abdullah, the parenting program director of the Greater Good Science Center, and her team were invited in to focus on parent and caregiver support. By helping design resources like their parenting workbook and communities of practice for parents and family engagement specialists, they ensured that the work reached not only students, but the adults who support them at home.

“Mental health and well-being obviously doesn’t just exist in one vacuum of a context of school,” Abdullah says. “But, certainly, within the family system, too.”

In addition to the workbook for professionals who work with parents and families, Abdullah and her team at the Greater Good Science Center created a collection of digital resources for people within schools to tap into and provide ways to teach well-being to parents and families.

The goal was to make the resources both practical and shareable. They offered slide decks for practitioners within schools as a visual aid to share with parents, and the CoP provided an interactive element to introduce these keys to well-being and the science behind them.

“Rather than it being, here are some policies and procedures and things that need to be followed, this was a space that invited tenderness and gentleness with one another,” Abdullah says. “I think that also may have been a novel type of professional development experience for a lot of folks.”

Sustaining change through care and connection

CalHOPE is not just a statewide SEL and mental health initiative, but a case study in what it really takes to drive systemic change in education, especially when it’s slow and deeply human. There is very rarely one path to creating change, and it often requires an ability to adapt to changing needs and different ways to look at progress.

“Working with schools, people go there because they care,” Kooler says. “Very few people sign up because they’re going to make a lot of money doing that. It’s a living, but they do it because they care and they want to make the world a better place for young people.”

While funding is crucial for initiatives like CalHOPE to not only function, but thrive, having people and organizations that are dedicated to ensuring that change happens is a pivotal component.

From the constant pressure of limited funding, leadership turnover, and uneven starting points, the CalHOPE model has not been without challenges, but it demonstrates what can be achieved when cross-sector partnerships align around shared goals. In less than a decade, CalHOPE has grown from a small Sacramento pilot to a $120 million initiative operating in 56 of California’s 58 counties.

Its trajectory illustrates how systemic change in education often takes root through modest beginnings and a willingness to evolve. As the state considers the future of SEL and student mental health, CalHOPE offers one possible blueprint for fostering educator and student well-being.