About SKIP
How We Started
Efforts to improve education are many times short-term, can make things worse, or are unsustainable over time. SKIP began in 2017 with a goal to work differently. We sought out to listen to and design with children, their families, and educators through a feedback lens to identify how the system is structured and areas of leverage to foster long-term equity in education. SKIP’s expertise in school social work, social emotional learning, youth development, and system dynamics roots us in rigorous and compassionate research and design.
With support from a small family foundation with roots in St. Louis, SKIP was launched with the goal of understanding systemic barriers in education across the span of child and youth development. Over time, SKIP has grown to engage with students, families, and educators on a number of challenges, from improving the connection between research and practice so that practitioners are centered; to collaboration across district and charter schools in St. Louis City.
Using the method of system dynamics, originally created at MIT and now popularized to address issues of climate change, energy, housing, and other challenges, SKIP fosters a rigorous, feedback-aware approach to improvement that prioritizes the people who are most affected by policy change and interventions.
Where We’re Heading
After almost a decade of learning and incubating a community-based approach to redesigning services and school with the people who utilizes them, in summer of 2025, we transitioned our research activities to a local university to deepen our partnership with the St. Louis Research-Practice Collaborative and the Center for Educational Learning. This allows us to sustain an approach to community-driven research with resources and accountability from a major institution.
In the age of rapid technological advancements to society, we have also doubled-down on our belief that unless we engage and learn about tools like artificial intelligence and machine learning, communities in poverty will potentially become even more marginalized. As an organization, we are deepening our integration of technology for better community engagement, relationship development, and solution-finding. Check out our development of CoModel.io to see how we’re making systems mapping tools more collaborative and augmentable using AI technology.
Through time, though our activities are evolving, we values remain the same. We recommit to our belief that people with diverse forms of expertise, when working together, can create better communities for kids and their families.