from Minnesota
About Us
Stephen Bosacker, Principal
Background
My name is Stephen Bosacker. I have co-created and empowered small organizations, particularly charter schools, for over 25 years. My journey with charter schools started with my wife and our two children. We joined the founding team of PACT Charter School in Ramsey, MN in 1993. We worked with the team of visionaries to build a new and exciting school where parents and teachers worked hand-in-hand to ensure student success. After starting with 88 students in 1994, PACT today, serves over 650 K-12 students with a waiting list in the hundreds.
Direct involvement in growing the school led to working with a charter school services company. Since those early days I have served over 2 dozen schools and developed in-depth knowledge and experience with all aspects of charter school development, facilities design, operations improvements, funding and development, regulatory reporting, governance and board development, charter applications, and training. These services cover over 17 years of consulting with charter schools. providing necessary services involving most aspects of school design, development and operations.
Real school situations led me to research and re-vision what can help schools dramatically improve over time. Go to the Services page to learn more.
Education and Certifications
M.Ed. in Human Resource Development (Organization Development and Adult Learning & Training)
M.S.
Certified Human Systems Dynamics Professional
Professional Project Management Certificate
Trained in Technology of Participation
System Dynamics Society member
Spryng.io service provider
Our Approach
Managing and leveraging real organization drivers for change
Do you have a pressing need? The common sense response is to fix it right now. If the problem is solved, excellent. However, often just fixing a problem in an organization rarely simple or direct.
Fixing problems that resurface over and over leads to poor performance, burnout, turnover, and sometimes a disaster. When that happens we recognize that something fundamental is being missed. Solving or eliminating recurring challenges in effective ways creates space to build a more successful and durable organization.
Arete’s approach to creating improvements respects the realities of the organization’s people, context and systems. Just as no one would think putting lawnmower parts into a box makes a functioning mower, creating or shaping an organization involves much more than replacing a person or position, or changing a policy. Organizations are dynamic, living entities with many people hopefully working well together to meet the organization's mission or purpose. As has been said, it's complicated...
The organization is ideally whole and effective. The whole is composed of many people and features. We seek to respect every person in the organization whether employees or ones being served, such as students in a school. The whole is always a result of how the essential "parts" interact. The organization or school is set in the context of a greater whole - the community and beyond. Respect for each of these levels is necessary because each level constantly affects the others.
How do we create durable improvements in organizational function and results? There is no boilerplate. Each durable solution is as unique as its organization and its people. Arete Consulting inquires to understand the unique members, structure, and design of each organization. We track common principles between organizations. Then apply them with the unique configurations of each organization. The power to change and improve is built with the people. In this way we apply effective service to empower change driven by the organization's people.
Effective organizations are able to create stable processes out of complex and even chaotic conditions. Your organization is a human system that is actively organizing every day in diverse ways as people interact and do their work. What happened in the past affects the present and will affect the future. But as things change or conditions require change, can your organization adapt to meet new needs and requirements? Agile organizations do this and thrive. Arete exists to enable each client to become more agile and more successful.
Starting in 2022 Arete Consulting makes available a new service through a partnership with Spryng.io. This platform service through Arete enables people in your organization as well as any stakeholders to contribute their personal experiences and meaning with your organization. Their experiences are directly related to a challenge or question your organization wants to learn more about in order to solve a challenge. Through contextualized analysis their stories become insights into how your organization functions and what can be done to improve it.
Creating capacity and momentum to adapt and improve at the organization level is a function of building capacity and momentum to adapt and improve at the individual and team levels. Changing one without the other simply increases friction! Changing across the organization in concert can lead to significant improvements - in the ways that matter to you.
Please send a question and let's have a conversation about what matters to you in this season.
* Human Systems Dynamics see https://www.hsdinstitute.org/ "Nothing is Intractable." Stephen Bosacker is a Certified Human Systems Dynamics Professional.
