Today, many kids are attending schools that are on average 40 years old, with deteriorating classrooms, poor temperature control, and harsh lighting, inspiring the American Society of Civil Engineers to assign them a grade of “F” in its 1998 infrastructure report. The Foundation supports policy that will enable and empower communities to design schools around a community’s aspirations, creating schools that are lasting monuments to community values and contributors to economic growth.

The Foundation encourages helpful community engagement that seeks to create community ownership and allow community members to influence official decisions. The Foundation helps school districts engage their communities at all levels of education reform.

The Foundation encourages and supports communities to engage in the planning and design of their new school facilities, researching and reflecting on the most effective learning environments, and considering how the schools could be designed to serve the entire community. Across the state of Ohio and the nation, communities are rebuilding and renovating their school facilities, investing more than $23 billion in Ohio alone. The Foundation helps ensure that these communities build schools that most effectively serve the needs of students, and community members.

The Foundation supports the development of tools and resources that encourage and assist communities, both nationally and within Ohio, in redesigning their schools as "Centers of Community." By creating school facilities that accommodate a wide range of community activities - from workout spaces to evening courses for adults - schools build community support for new construction, and a space that can be use outside traditional school hours, by all members of the community.