Austin Aspires Director Jennifer Lawhead spoke with Hispanic parents at Woodson Kindergarten Center Thursday to help generate ideas for education in Austin.

It was just one of the recent steps for Austin Aspires to collect research with hopes to create specific goals within 2015.

“Right now, it’s every week, I’m connecting with a different community group,” Lawhead said.

Austin Aspires — a spin-off of Vision 2020 — formed to meet the goals of the education leader’s vision. The Austin Aspires board and Lawhead are working to get community leaders together in 2015 to discuss the full cradle-to-career education system in Austin. The ultimate goal is to select a few key outcomes the community wants for students so each child is ready to leave school and join the workforce.

Lawhead said this winter will focus on researching what the community wants.

Austin Aspires came about after Vision 2020 conducted research and decided Austin didn’t need another program in town, but instead needed to build bridges and enhance what it already had, according to Lawhead.

“[It’s] not just on our schools, but the community at large is responsible for the education of our kids,” she said.

Austin Aspires has partnered with Austin Public Schools, Pacelli Catholic Schools and Riverland Community College to find out what will help benefit students. They have also received donations from Mayo Clinic Health System, Hormel Foods Corp. and the Hormel Foundation to get up and running in the first couple of years.

The group’s mission statement is to bring together community resources and families to challenge all learners to seek excellence and equip them to achieve results through shared community vision, evidence-based decision making, collaborative action, and investment and sustainability.

“When we started with our vision statements almost three years ago, what we talked about was becoming known as leaders in education,” Vision 2020 Director of Vision Creation Laura Helle said.

Lawhead has met with several groups already to seek input about what’s going well and what some barriers are for the students currently, including community groups like the Lions and the Kiwanis clubs, and the student council at Austin High School. She was especially excited to speak with the students to find out what they think is important.

“They’re perspective is really critical,” she said. “To hear from them is really valuable.”

Lawhead pointed out that the process is slow, noting that other places that have done similar projects have taken two or three years to finish. Helle agreed, calling it a transformative perspective change.

“That is going to be a very longterm project,” Helle said. “It’s not going to happen overnight.”

Lawhead hopes by the end of the year, Austin Aspires will have identified goals and ways to measure out how to accomplish them. She hopes that by meeting with community members they can create goals they all agree on and are willing to work toward.

“The more information we have about the needs of the community the better our work will be,” she said.

“Once those goals are in place, then we can form groups of experts in that area,” she added.

Although there are no goals put in place yet, Helle said they could range from simply having a parent read to their kids every night, or getting businesses to hire a summer student intern.

“Ultimately, Austin Aspires is going to want to tap into every community resource and have them support education,” she said.

Helle noted the importance of learning outside of the classroom.

“We don’t want to isolate education and make it just something done by the schools and by the teachers,” she said.

Lawhead hopes to get community leaders together this summer to start laying out what those goals might look like in the Austin community.

“If there isn’t engagement from the community, then it will just be some words on some paper,” she said. “There’s a great wealth of ideas in our community and knowledge about what our needs are.”

Lawhead has been excited with what she has found so far in community members, and she can’t wait to start gathering ideas and creating goals.

“They are really a community that gathers together to support our kids,” she said.

Next, Lawhead will speak at the next “Social Concerns” session at the Hormel Historic Home scheduled to 10 a.m. Tuesday.