The containment gap
The missing middle every adult can see
Every adult who has worked in a school can picture this kid. A teacher flags explosive anger in October. A counselor notes withdrawal by January. Parents are called in, a plan gets written, and within a few weeks the behavior takes a new shape—sometimes worse, sometimes just harder to name. Disciplinary infractions accumulate over the months, met with sporadic compliance and the occasional good week that doesn't sustain. The interventions all look the same: individual, behavior-by-behavior, aimed at whatever is visible on the surface. None of them are built to catch the developmental need underneath while it’s still possible to scaffold.
So the referral moves along—handled correctly at every step—until the problem disappears from view or tips into the only system built to act on all of it at once: crisis response.
The initiative
A new infrastructure layer for public schools
Futureschool Collaborative exists because the infrastructure most schools need to support child and adolescent development doesn’t exist yet as a recognized, funded, or accountable layer. Schools invest in academic programs. They invest in crisis response. But almost nothing goes toward the coordination layer in between—the shared frameworks, protocols, and adult capacity that catch developmental need early, before it drifts into something only the most severe systems are built to handle.
Building that layer—in real school conditions, in partnership with districts, with documentation and learning built into the work from the start—is what Futureschool Collaborative is for. The initiative is housed within the Oakland Public Education Fund, which provides fiscal sponsorship, administrative infrastructure, and institutional credibility across Oakland public schools. The practice-based work is led by the team at Bloom Collective.
Learn more about the partnership structure between Futureschool Collaborative and the Oakland Public Education Fund here.
The leadership
A partnership the field has not yet seen
The initiative is led by two practitioners whose work converges at the precise intersection this problem requires: systems design and behavioral health science, meeting at the level of the school and the district.
Tricia Douglas
Doctoral Researcher, Transition Design · Carnegie Mellon University
Tricia Douglas’ work sits at the intersection of systems design, organizational change, and human development. As a doctoral researcher in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon, she examines how learning environments shape identity, belonging, behavior, and developmental capacity over time—and what it takes to design them differently. That question is the engine of Futureschool Collaborative. She has spent several years working directly with schools, districts, and community organizations to build the kind of developmental infrastructure and pedagogical rigor this initiative is now formalizing at scale.
Khalima Bolden-Thompson, PhD
Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences · UC Davis Early Psychosis Centers
Dr. Khalima Bolden-Thompson brings clinical and neurobiological precision to the partnership—the depth of understanding that distinguishes a developmental signal from a behavioral label, and the scientific grounding that makes the framework more than well-intentioned practice. Her work in early psychosis intervention and community-based behavioral health has shaped how she thinks about early stabilization: the window before diagnosis and before crisis, where the most meaningful intervention is still possible. That window is exactly where Futureschool Collaborative operates.
The intellectual home
Rooted in the Design for Development framework
Futureschool Collaborative is the district-scale expression of a larger intellectual project: Development by Design, or DxD—a practice-based framework examining how the environments, technologies, institutions, and relationships that surround people shape their capacity to grow, learn, and lead full lives.
DxD is the theoretical home of this work. Bloom Collective is its living laboratory. Futureschool Collaborative is where it meets public school systems at scale.
DxD emerged from a simple but consequential observation: most designed environments—schools, workplaces, products, institutions—are not designed with human development as an explicit goal. They shape development anyway, but without intention, without accountability, and without the frameworks that would allow the people inside them to recognize what is happening and intervene.
The developmental infrastructure model Futureschool Collaborative is building is DxD applied against the real constraints of public schools—staffing, funding, a single school year: what does it look like to design a school environment that actively supports the neurological and social development of the young people inside it, not as a program layered on top, but as the structural logic of how adults see, coordinate, and respond?
↓ Download the DxD field briefThe proposition
Moving schools from a behavior management culture to developmental infrastructure
That is the intellectual spine of this work—a genuine reorientation of what schools are understood to be for and what adults inside them are equipped to do.
The model we are building—Align, Operationalize, Coordinate—is the practical answer to that question. It doesn’t ask schools to become therapeutic environments or to take on responsibilities that belong to clinical systems. It asks them to do what they are already positioned to do—steward the healthy development of young people—with a developmental framework that makes that stewardship possible to act on, day to day.
The full argument for why this matters, why now, and what the structural gap looks like is laid out in The Case. The shape of the framework is documented in The Model.