How TechChange helped TCS turn a national conversation on digital access, STEM education, and the future of work into collective action across four US cities.
Digital Empowers is TCS’s platform for bringing cross-sector leaders together around the challenges shaping America’s connected future. For the Collaborating for Connected Futures series, TCS wanted to take that mission on the road, into four cities that look nothing alike, each with its own ecosystem of businesses, schools, nonprofits, and civic institutions.
TechChange served as the end-to-end design and delivery partner. We were involved from the first ideation session through the run-of-show, on-site facilitation, registration, and the final analysis of what worked and why.
TCS wasn’t looking for another panel-and-coffee circuit. The goal was to move cross-sector partnerships from conversation to collective action, and to do it in New York, Detroit, Dallas, and Chicago.
The people in these rooms were already deep in this work. That set a high bar. The series had to surface the practical, local challenges each city was wrestling with while staying anchored to the national picture, and it had to give busy, expert participants a real reason to show up and stay for the full day.
Before we designed a single session, we ran a human-centered ideation workshop with the TCS team. We built four learner personas covering education leaders, community and NGO leaders, corporate and foundation leaders, and public-sector leaders, then mapped the goals, motivations, and barriers that would shape how each group experienced the day.
That work paid off early. It told us corporate leaders came for connection, while education and public-sector leaders wanted a stage to show their work. The format had to serve both.
We built a repeatable structure: keynotes to set the frame, a partnership panel, breakout sessions that paired an inspirational fireside chat with hands-on application, and dedicated time to connect. Then we treated every city as a chance to make the next one sharper.
Detroit told us the room wanted to talk about AI, so we added an AI panel. It became one of the liveliest sessions of the whole series and stayed in the program from then on.
Dallas showed us people were slipping out before the second breakout to beat traffic and get home. So in Chicago we compressed the day, combined the breakouts into one strong morning block, and wrapped programming earlier with a connection hour to close. Retention climbed.
By the final event, the format wasn’t a guess. It was tuned.
We didn’t run the same event four times. We ran a format that got smarter at every stop.
Each stop had its own character, and each one taught us something we carried into the next.
We opened during UN General Assembly week, drawing a mix of New Yorkers and global leaders in town for UNGA. Different organizations, we heard again and again, keep running into the same barriers, which is exactly why partnership matters.
The most local room of the series. Nearly everyone came from Detroit itself, and many already knew each other, but the day pushed them to imagine partners they’d never considered. It’s also where the AI panel found its footing.
A Texas-anchored gathering that pulled people from Austin, Houston, Atlanta, and as far as Los Angeles. The wider mix broadened the conversation, and the day’s rhythm taught us how to hold a room through a full agenda.
Our biggest hyper-local crowd and our sharpest agenda yet. Participants left asking for more: a deeper, expert-led follow-up. It was the clearest signal that the series had built something worth continuing.
Across four cities and nine months, we convened close to 200 leaders from business, education, nonprofits, and government. The number that mattered most to them, though, wasn’t attendance. It was connection.
The breakouts were the engine of the series. Feedback pointed to the same thing over and over: the chance to sit with people from other sectors, trade what’s working and what isn’t, and leave with partners they wouldn’t have found on their own. People told us they walked away with energy and hope from watching peers take on hard problems in digital inclusion, STEM education, and workforce readiness.
Different missions, same barriers. Across every city, participants kept landing on the same insight, and it is exactly what makes collective action worth the effort.
A recurring theme from participant feedback
A few takeaways we are carrying into future convenings, and that any organization planning a series like this should weigh:
TechChange has designed and delivered learning experiences and convenings since 2010, reaching more than 1 million learners across 198 countries and running over 1,000 courses and events. We work with governments, multilaterals, NGOs, foundations, universities, and corporate partners to turn complex goals into experiences people actually want to be part of. From an intimate workshop to a multi-city series to a global forum, we bring the same thing to every room: instructional design, production, facilitation, and technology in one end-to-end team.