Quality improvement and impact guided by seeing the system
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FILLER
Jordan & Ireland
Atlanta, GA
Managing Director, Quality Improvement & Impact, Boys & Girls Clubs of America
Co-Founder & Chief Growth Officer, Leading Through Connection
Director, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Program Specialist, Institute for Healthcare Improvement
Applying tools for systemic improvement in social sector organizations
Before Fuqua, I spent four years at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement building a foundation in quality improvement methodologies. This work sparked my conviction that tools for systemic improvement in healthcare could be powerfully applied to social sector challenges. That belief, combined with a desire to develop organizational and policy skills to operate at greater scale, brought me to Duke.
After completing my MBA and MPP, I joined the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, where I spent nearly five years coaching educational leaders in continuous improvement and networked learning, including leading a statewide literacy initiative in Tennessee. I then co-founded a consultancy focused on the mindsets and behaviors essential for effective leadership. In 2019, I joined Boys & Girls Clubs of America, where I have spent almost seven years building national infrastructure for youth impact across approximately 1,000 local organizations. Now serving as Managing Director, I lead four teams that consult with Club leaders in quality improvement, trauma-informed practice, staff development, and program implementation.
In my current role, I spend my days…
Coaching Club leaders through complex quality challenges, developing and training staff at both the national and local level, and guiding my own teams to maintain alignment and strategic focus. I analyze data to diagnose what Clubs need and where to direct resources, as well as to translate what works for consistency and quality into tools, frameworks, and resources to share across our network. A significant part of my work is building a shared understanding of what quality means for Boys & Girls Clubs, why it matters, and how to achieve it, so that continuous improvement becomes a way of working rather than a compliance exercise.
An impact highlight from my work I am proud of
I carry a lot of pride in my current work at the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, where we center youth impact and outcomes as the primary measure of success. One of the first things I led was the development and launch of the Youth Impact Network, a cohort-based consulting model that represents a fundamental shift in how BGCA supports local Club organizations in quality improvement. Rather than relying on trainings for frontline staff or hoping leaders implement practices in a way that sticks, we designed a longer-term engagement model that meets Club leaders where they are and supports them through improving the systems, organizational processes, and infrastructure that make quality sustainable over time. This meant elevating our work from point-of-service to organizational leadership, and shifting our posture from content delivery to improvement coaching. Most importantly, we had to change how we think about quality itself. We had to model the perspective that quality is built and maintained over time – it requires looking at variation across organizations, studying consistency of practice, and using data longitudinally to understand whether conditions are actually improving.
What I am most proud of is the shift in our working theory of change: lasting improvement does not happen solely through training, checklists, and assessments. It happens when leaders understand their own organizational conditions, can diagnose barriers to quality, use data to surface and iterate on effective solutions, and engage their teams to drive lasting change from within. Building Club leader capacity to drive their improvement journeys, and watching my team learn to facilitate that, has been one of the most meaningful professional experiences of my career.
A resource I recommend to impact professionals
My former colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, who are now co-founders of the Improvement Collective, recently published a book outlining the approach to quality improvement that I have used across my career: Journey to Improvement: A Team Guide to Systems Change in Education, Healthcare, and Social Welfare by Alicia Grunow, Sandra Park, and Brandon Bennett. I highly recommend this book to anyone across the social sector interested in centering impact and outcomes.
A mindset I have cultivated to guide my work
Across different disciplines, I see the same essential truth surfacing: you cannot lead what you do not truly understand. Bryan Stevenson calls it “getting proximate.” In improvement science, we call it “walking the floors.” In my own meditation practice, I call it seeing reality as it is. Whatever the phrasing, the principle is the same: leaders must be willing to deeply understand what is actually working or not working for the people they serve. This kind of understanding prevents leaders from making decisions in a vacuum, and ensures that the vision they set, the data they use, and the strategies they implement are grounded enough to lead to real impact.
My tip for current Fuqua students
One of the greatest benefits of my dual degree was the cross-pollination between Fuqua and the Sanford School of Public Policy. Engaging with faculty and peers who brought a policy lens to social sector challenges deepened my understanding of the problems I wanted to solve in ways that business school alone could not have. My advice to anyone at Fuqua with social sector aspirations: go deeper into the issues. Understand the history of the problem, the solutions that have already been tried, and why they fell short and seek out the organizations already doing the work. That context will sharpen your strategy and help you move further, faster.