When the College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards project began, there really was nowhere else to go but up. The project was up against great odds--a dearth of funding, a history of incivility amongst the disciplines within social studies, a knack for ending up in media battles over what should be taught in a social studies curriculum, a lack of disciplinary and interdisciplinary coherence within previous social studies standards documents, and the list went on. In the first couple of months, one of the more optimistic colleagues on the C3 project gave the work about a 30 percent chance of success. He wasn't that far off. At the time this project began, the Common Core State Standards reform movement was sweeping the country. The majority of states had formally adopted the new standards in English Language Arts and Mathematics emphasizing a "fewer, higher, clearer" approach to K-12 education. That action created tremors within the social studies community that they could be further squeezed out of the curriculum. By January 2010, a few months before the Common Core Standards were officially published, two groups were meeting concurrently to discuss the critical state of social studies education. The Social Studies Assessment, Curriculum and Instruction (SSACI) is a state collaborative within the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) made up of state-level social studies consultants, assessment experts, and administrative personnel who are on the front lines of adoption and implementation of standards within their states. The meetings of these groups provided a forum for examining the current needs and issues facing the states and allowed state education agencies to draw from a greater pool of experience. Work on the C3 Framework began in the fall of 2010 with the development of a conceptual guidance document written by individuals from the Social Studies Assessment, Curriculum and Instruction state collaborative and representatives from the Task Force. This article summarizes a number of these foundational ideas that provided a common frame of reference and became a guide to the writers of the C3 Framework. It also describes what social studies teachers can do right now to help implement the C3 Framework.