Story by Dwain Hebda
With a stellar resume and extensive education that includes multiple master’s degrees, including one from the Clinton School of Public Service in 2024, Cambre Horne-Brooks could have applied her skills anywhere in the United States.
Instead, the Fayetteville native decided to keep things close to home, improving educational opportunities in her own backyard of Northwest Arkansas.
Horne-Brooks, executive director of the Fayetteville Public Education Foundation, works to improve public education through projects that demonstrate innovation and transformative benefits.
“I have been with the Fayetteville Public Education Foundation for the last 11 years,” Horne-Brooks said. “We seek out innovation and make systemic changes to close opportunity gaps to ensure that all of our kids have education equity. We do this by providing grants to teachers in our school district.
“I wanted to really use the Clinton School as an opportunity to enhance my information about social justice, equity-oriented issues and to enlarge my capacity to basically address these multifaceted issues that are facing our communities.”
Many people treat their graduation from high school or college as the close of a chapter, but to Horne-Brooks’ way of thinking, such milestones are just signposts on a lifelong journey. After earning her undergraduate degree in social work and criminal justice from the University of Arkansas in 2020, she completed a Master of Social Work from UA Little Rock in 2002. Two decades later, she logged on for her first class at the Clinton School.
Asked what moved her to go back to school after already crafting a successful career in public service roles, she said the decision was simple.
“I just really value being a lifelong learner,” she said. “I really wanted to see what was new going on and be able to embrace those things in my work. I knew the Clinton School was going to reorient me and reinvest my experience in the social fields and kind of shift me into the 21st century.
“The Clinton School allowed me to reexamine theory systems, policy formation and program development factors that I wouldn’t necessarily get in some of the other professional development sectors I had access to. I really did want to accept that challenge and see if an old dog could learn new tricks.”
One of the elements that made her experience so impactful was, as a nontraditional learner, she could approach subject matter from a posture of experience. Conversely, she also applied new concepts directly into the living laboratory of the working world, such as when she focused her Capstone project on the Fayetteville Public Education Foundation.
“My Capstone looked at college and career readiness counseling centers that needed to be put in place in public education in Northwest Arkansas,” she said. “Right now, we are woefully underserved in those areas because so many students are left to navigate that by themselves after graduation. It’s interesting because the way public education is set up right now, we have an expectation that students should be ready to enter kindergarten, but we’re challenged as a public education system to have kids ready for college or advanced degrees upon leaving high school.
“My project showed that a really strong theory of change that could happen if our public schools invested in departments that could help children and students ramp into careers and into opportunities for higher education, whatever that looks like. Public schools happen to be the epicenter where many of these kids can get those experiences but if there’s not someone there to help them with it, many are left to traverse the complex system alone, creating a gap in social mobility and economic prosperity in our community.”
Another aspect of her Clinton School education was leadership development, something that has come in handy as she has begun to apply what she had learned to the foundation. She’s found new challenges in helping stakeholders adapt to the new thinking and innovation she was exposed to via the curriculum.
“I think it’s going to be a little bit of a slow drip right now,” she said. “I think all the program development and the ideas on evaluation that I’ve learned have bubbled up here in our office over what kind of investments we are making. How are we seeing that investment bring about change and how are we realizing that theory of change?
“That’s a shift that’s been happening since I started the Clinton School. As a matter of fact, this summer we held a workshop for our board to get together and start talking about some of these ideas and how we can really examine the kind of impact the foundation can make in a much more systemic way. I think that’s also an avenue to really impart upon the group.”
Cambre Horne-Brooks earned her Master of Public Service from the Clinton School in 2024. She serves as Executive Director of the Fayetteville Public Education Foundation.
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