Improving Stakeholder Buy-In Through Legitimate Participation: The Improvement Story of IowaBIG

Abstract

This quality improvement project aims to help IowaBIG, a public school project-based-learning program, identify potential ways to improve stakeholder legitimacy. This mixed-methods project found strengths in stakeholder participation along with barriers that prevented stakeholders from becoming full members of the community of practice. We found that while stakeholders value the work of IowaBIG, there are practices that prevent them from moving towards full participation as legitimate stakeholders. This led to the following recommendations to improve the legitimization of IowaBIG stakeholders: 1) bring clarity of purpose to all stakeholders 2) ensure a unified application of processes for all stakeholders 3) make the products of IowaBIG visible to all stakeholders.