Civic Infrastructure:  How a community holds itself collectively accountable and organizes to 
implement a cradle-to-career vision. The StriveTogether Theory of Action™ identifies four 
pillars of work to build a civic infrastructure — Shared Vision, Evidence-based Decision Making, 
Collaborative Action, and Investment and Sustainability. 
 
Community Authority: Grounding work in the context of the community includes engaging a 
broad array of community voices through building awareness and information sharing; 
involving and mobilizing the community toward improvement; and co-developing solutions and 
strategies with community members. 
 
Contributing and Core Indicators: Core indicators are specific measures used to track progress 
on community-level outcomes. Contributing indicators are measured against data available in 
real time to indicate whether core indicators are improving. For example, early-grade reading 
(community-level outcome) is typically measured by a state assessment (core indicator), and 
chronic absenteeism can be used as a short-term predictor of students’ proficiency 
(contributing indicator).