How FCAN is Building Florida's College Attainment Movement

Florida’s future depends on a highly educated workforce. For more than a decade, the Florida College Access Network (FCAN), in partnership with Helios Education Foundation, has worked to help meet that need by bringing together educators, employers, nonprofits, philanthropy, policymakers, and community leaders around one shared goal: helping more Floridians access and earn a high-value postsecondary degree or credential.

The need for that collaboration has never been greater. As Florida’s economy continues to grow and evolve, employers increasingly need workers with the knowledge and skills gained through education beyond high school. At the same time, some of Florida’s greatest opportunities for increasing college attainment are among populations of students who continue to face the greatest barriers to earning a degree or credential.

No single school, college, nonprofit, or employer can solve these challenges alone. Increasing postsecondary attainment in Florida requires a shared vision, local leadership, and cross-sector collaboration.

For the past 15 years, FCAN has helped build that movement through a collective-impact approach that aligns partners, resources, and community action around shared goals.

“FCAN was never intended to be one organization solving one problem. It was designed as a movement, built by communities, for communities.”

– Paul J. Luna, President & CEO, Helios Education Foundation

Why Florida Needed to Transform Student Success

Before FCAN existed, colleges, school districts, nonprofits, and local leaders were engaged in innovative programs to help students prepare for and succeed in higher education.

However, these efforts often operated independently and lacked coordination.

Communities faced different challenges, resources varied by region, and successful strategies were not always shared statewide. While local innovation was producing promising results, there was no coordinated infrastructure to connect communities, align efforts, or measure collective progress toward a common goal.

Leaders recognized that improving college access and success would require more than expanding individual programs. Florida needed a statewide network that encouraged collaboration, elevated local leadership, and united organizations around a shared vision for student success.

That vision became increasingly evident as FCAN encouraged, and the state of Florida established, a statewide college attainment goal in 2019 calling for 60% of Floridians ages 25-64 to hold a high-value postsecondary degree or credential. Such a goal would give communities across the state a common destination and reinforce the need for coordinated action to achieve it.

The History of ENLACE and How it Became FCAN

But before there was FCAN, there was ENLACE (Engaging Latino Communities for Education), established to improve college access and success for Latino students at the University of South Florida. ENLACE demonstrated the power of regional partnerships that brought together K–12 schools, colleges and universities, nonprofits, businesses, and community organizations around shared student success goals.

Those early collaborations revealed an important lesson: While communities had unique needs, they also shared many of the same barriers to postsecondary attainment.

The concept of local collaboration demonstrated early success and the possibility to scale and go deeper became apparent.

As conversations continued among education and philanthropic leaders, a broader question emerged:

What if every Florida community had the support, partnerships, and shared vision needed to help more students succeed?

That question became the foundation for what would eventually become the Florida College Access Network.

Helios and FCAN Partner to Bring Statewide Vision to Life

When Helios Education Foundation expanded its work in Florida, it recognized an opportunity to help connect leaders already working to improve college access and student success across the state. Rather than creating a separate initiative, Helios invested in a collaborative planning process designed to build on existing strengths and develop a shared statewide vision.

In 2011, Helios awarded a $200,000 planning grant to support the development of what would formally become FCAN. The grant helped convene leaders from philanthropy, K–12 and higher education, state agencies, community foundations, and nonprofit organizations through a statewide planning task force.

Together, those partners explored what Florida needed from a statewide college access network, how the organization should be structured, and how it could best support local communities and leaders. The process helped establish FCAN’s initial strategy, governance, and role within Florida’s broader education ecosystem through a collective-impact approach. Rather than relying on any one institution or strategy, FCAN was designed to align partners, resources, data, policies, and community action around shared goals while empowering communities to develop solutions that respond to local needs.

As FCAN grew, Helios’ support evolved along with it. The partnership increasingly focused on the strategic capabilities FCAN needed to mature from an emerging organization into a durable statewide network. That included support for organizational development, strategic planning, leadership capacity, research and data use, communications, statewide convenings, and the expansion of Local College Access Networks (LCANs).

During this transition, Helios served as a key partner for FCAN as it refined its statewide role, responded to changes in Florida’s education and workforce landscape, and built greater alignment around postsecondary attainment. Over time, the relationship became less about supporting a single initiative and more about helping FCAN develop the capacity to lead, convene, and adapt statewide.

That long-term approach reflects Helios’ broader philosophy of systems change. Through its partnership with FCAN, Helios helped create the conditions for a statewide network to take root, grow, and contribute to a shared ownership model among the communities and partners FCAN serves.

The Role of LCAN’s in Florida

At the heart of FCAN’s model are LCANs. Each one brings together partners within a community, including school districts, colleges and universities, nonprofit organizations, employers, local government, and philanthropy, to identify barriers facing students and develop strategies that reflect local priorities.

While every community’s work looks different, each network shares the common purpose of helping more students access, complete, and benefit from postsecondary education.

This local ownership model is one of FCAN’s greatest strengths.

Rather than prescribing one statewide solution, FCAN provides the tools, research, data, and convening power that help communities learn from one another while remaining responsive to their region’s students and unique needs.

The result is a collective impact model built on shared accountability, continuous learning, and collaboration.

FCAN’s Lasting Impact on Postsecondary Success

More than a decade after its launch, FCAN has helped establish one of the nation’s strongest statewide college attainment networks.

Today:

• 19 LCANs collectively serve communities representing approximately 82% of Florida’s population;
• communities across the state are using shared data to strengthen student pathways;
• cross-sector partnerships continue to align education with workforce needs; and
• Florida remains focused on achieving its SAIL to 60 goal which is at 55%, up from 49% when the bill passed.

The Next Chapter of Florida’s College Attainment Work

Nearly 15 years after FCAN’s launch, Florida has something that did not exist when this work began: a statewide network connecting communities around a shared vision for postsecondary attainment.

Significant progress has been made, but the work is far from finished. Florida continues to face workforce demands, demographic shifts, and persistent attainment gaps that require sustained collaboration across sectors.

“FCAN has helped build the movement. Helios Education Foundation helped create the conditions for that movement to grow.”

– Braulio Colón, Executive Director, Florida College Access Network

FCAN’s latest strategic vision represents the next chapter of Florida’s college attainment work, building on the strength of local networks, using data to identify and address barriers, aligning education with workforce opportunity, and advancing Talent Strong Florida’s goal of ensuring more Floridians earn the degrees and credentials that lead to economic opportunity.

For Helios, this next chapter underscores the value of strategic partnership. What began as an idea over a decade ago has become a critical component of Florida’s infrastructure for expanding postsecondary access and attainment. Now, FCAN and its partners have an opportunity to build on this foundation, reaching more communities, removing persistent barriers to the work, and creating pathways to opportunity for more Floridians.

Because the measure of a movement isn’t simply what it builds, it’s in how much farther the movement takes us.