Education · Civic
7,000+
Rochester City School District
We designed and ran school participatory budgeting across 10 campuses, giving thousands of students a real say over real budgets.
Strategy · Systems · Facilitation
Good strategy dies in the gap between values and operations.
Educe is a woman-owned consultancy that helps close it. We work with communities, institutions, and businesses to align what they value with how they operate, then build the strategy, systems, and facilitation to make it hold. Our work runs across public health, education, civic systems, and responsible AI.
Trusted by the City & County of Denver, the City of San Antonio, Rochester City School District, and rural health & education partners.
Selected partners
City & County of Denver
City of San Antonio
Rochester City Schools
Healthy Archuleta
Pagosa Peak Open School
Kimanya-Ngeyo (Uganda)
What we do
Five practices. One throughline.
Whatever the domain, the job is the same: build systems that reflect what you value and hold up under real conditions.
Strategy & Systems Facilitation
Align your team and partners on a strategy you can execute.
We guide institutions and coalitions through transition. We clarify shared purpose and turn it into durable structure, governance, and practice.
Product Management & Development
Design and ship tools, digital or analog, that solve hard problems.
From AI writing systems to community-health intake flows, we handle the research, prototyping, and delivery, and we sweat the ethics as hard as the code.
Public Health Collaboration
Strengthen community-rooted care, especially where resources are thin.
We support health systems, nonprofits, and agencies with training design, care-coordination strategy, evaluation, and cross-sector partnerships.
Education Innovation
Build schools and learning systems worth showing up for.
We have founded microschools and built curricula, leadership pipelines, and the instructional systems that hold them together.
AI Ethics & Epistemic Design
Adopt AI without losing the integrity of thinking and learning.
We advise on AI strategy, run ethical audits, and design AI-human systems that support judgment instead of replacing it.
Explore all services
See how each practice works, what you get, and how engagements are scoped.
View services →How we work
You keep the capability, not just the deliverable.
We don't sell templates. We work inside your system and build so the capacity stays after we leave.
Listen & map
We learn your system from the inside, starting with what your people already know and where it breaks down.
Align on values
We run the hard conversations until purpose, strategy, and constraints actually agree.
Design the system
We turn that alignment into the structures, tools, and workflows that make it repeatable.
Build capacity
We hand the work off so your team can run it and improve it without us.
Featured engagement
Responsible AI in Secondary Classrooms
A four-month pilot that helps teachers use AI without gutting writing, reasoning, and source analysis. For districts that want the upside of AI and still want students who can think.
$6k–$12ktypical district contribution · ~4 months
- Phase 0 · Learning Integrity Audit. Survey teachers and review assignments & tools.
- Phase 1 · Teacher Design Studio. Redesign real assignments and draft a Responsible AI Use Guide.
- Phase 2 · Classroom Pilots. Teachers implement with coaching and document case studies.
- Phase 3 · Evaluation & Symposium. Measure impact and present to the community.
- Phase 4 · Scale-Up & Funding Strategy. Leave with frameworks and a funding-ready roadmap.
Selected work
A sample of the work.
Engagements across civic, education, and health systems.
Rural health · Food equity
Multi-year
Healthy Archuleta
Governance, evaluation, and community-based research for a rural food-and-health coalition, including a Food Security Navigator role we built into primary care.
Municipal · Evaluation
1st in CO
City & County of Denver
We designed and led the evaluation of Denver's first city-run participatory budget, trained community researchers, and co-wrote the published report.
Who we are
You work with the founders, not a bench of juniors.
We started Educe in 2020 on one conviction: most change fails for lack of coherence, not intelligence. The gap is usually between what a group values and how it actually operates.
NB
Natasha B. Bruss, MPH
Co-founder · Director
A strategist and operational leader with a background in finance, innovation, and public health. She held executive roles at Goldman Sachs and ASU's technology-transfer arm before moving into community health and education. She runs the operations and evaluation side of most engagements.
DB
Drew Brown, PhD
Co-founder
A systems thinker and educator working across AI ethics, curriculum design, and civic engagement. His doctoral research helped pioneer participatory budgeting in U.S. schools, which still runs through Educe's civic work. He leads on design, facilitation, and the harder questions about how AI changes learning.
Get in touch
Tell us what you're working on.
Starting something new or fixing something that's stuck, we're glad to talk. Messages reach the two of us directly.