WATCH: Learn more about the Nonprofit - Higher Education Innovation Alliance

The Nonprofit – Higher Education Innovation Alliance

A National Partnership Network to Strengthen First-Generation Student Success

The Nonprofit – Higher Education Innovation Alliance is a national partnership network led by America’s Promise Alliance (APA) that brings together colleges and leading nonprofit organizations that support first-generation college students on participating campuses. The Alliance creates a standardized, high-impact partnership model that allows colleges to move beyond fragmented, one-off nonprofit relationships and toward coordinated, data-informed, and scalable student success strategies.

The Challenge

Colleges across the U.S. are working with multiple nonprofit partners—each serving small cohorts of students, often without shared goals, shared data, or integrated advising. At the same time, nonprofits lack the scale, systems access, and institutional integration needed to fully align with campus strategies. The result is duplicated effort, administrative burden, and missed opportunities to improve persistence and completion.

The Opportunity

The Nonprofit–Higher Education Innovation Alliance establishes a standardized, scalable partnership model for colleges and nonprofits to work in coordinated, data-informed ways by providing:

A common partnership framework adopted by all participating nonprofits
Clear data-sharing protocols and defined institutional points of contact
Integrated advising and coordination practices
A national learning network for colleges and nonprofits to improve together

Leveraging the collective scale of leading nonprofits to achieve system-level change and institutionalizing proven best practices will ultimately lead to improved persistence and completion outcomes for first-generation students.

“By joining the Higher Education Innovation Alliance, we are excited to share our experience and learn from college partners across the nation as we collectively deepen our partnerships with nonprofit/CBO partners. This work will support campus staff to be effective partners and use data more efficiently and impactfully to better serve our students.”

Andrea Soonachan, EdD
Senior University Dean for K16 Initiatives & Adult Pathways
City University of New York (CUNY)

APA is now enrolling higher education partners through April 2026.

To learn more about this partnership, please contact Sarah Place, Vice President of Postsecondary to Workforce Pathways, at sarahp@americaspromise.org.