Stories create and sustain our unique and shared cultures. These stories become a set of data that informs our beliefs and values – and influence the systems that perpetuate the disparate and inequitable results kids and families of color and those experiencing poverty face across our country. Clint Smith kicked off the second day of…
StriveTogether President and CEO Jennifer Blatz opened the 2022 Cradle to Career Convening with a bold vision to place 100 million young people on a path to mobility in the United States. The Cradle to Career Network already reaches one in seven young people ages 0-24. Its work to change lives by changing systems is…
Improving economic and social mobility in our communities is complex work and cannot happen in a vacuum. As the philanthropic sector continues to grapple with the best way to address these layered challenges, the default is often a siloed approach that provides restricted programmatic support to generate outputs rather than a broader collaborative approach to…
Home is sacred. Home is safe. Yet as we heard from Matthew Desmond, author of “Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City,” and Terri Ludwig, president of Ballmer Group Philanthropy at Tuesday’s keynote plenary at the Roots to Rise 2021 Cradle to Career Network Convening, home is, far too often, out of reach…
Northfield Promise, a StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network member in Northfield, Minn., launched a Racial Equity Team in late 2019 to create an equitable environment for young people and families. Despite the obstacles of 2020, they made important strides in their first year. Here are three key insights from their work: Start with youth. The…
We can learn a great deal from Cradle to Career Fresno County’s approach to securing $10 million to support their local response to COVID-19. This is was the first time Fresno C2C leveraged federal funding, tapping into the more than $2 trillion set aside by Congress as part of the CARES Act that provides direct…
Preparing students for success is a critical component of the Literacy Lab’s Leading Men Fellowship program. Young men of color receive rigorous ongoing training in research-based early literacy intervention strategies that prepare pre-K children to be successful in school and later in life. Ten fellows — ages 18 to 24 — make up the Leading…
When reflecting on educational experiences that shaped who I am, I must admit, I don’t readily think of my earliest experiences before the age of 5. However, after attending a conference at the University of Chicago last week, I’m now more aware of how those early language and learning environments affected my future. The 2018…
Sessions at PolicyLink’s national Equity Summit 2018 around inclusion, diversity, equity and access across various sectors challenged participants to advance racial and economic equity at a greater scale. As a former educator, I found it impossible to disentangle the monumental task of creating a more equitable society across sectors from the work of the education…
Six months after becoming an independent nonprofit, StriveTogether has launched a bold and ambitious plan for building stronger systems for better outcomes. Our vision — Every Child, Cradle to Career — has been clear since the beginning, when the local partnership in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky began to take shape in 2006. Since then, change…
At StriveTogether, we are still riding high on the energy and ideas generated at the eighth annual Cradle to Career Network Convening. I hope you are feeling that high too if you were among the 400-plus champions of change who gathered in Phoenix last week for Be the Change: Getting Results for Every Child. Amid…
“It’s time for us to lay it all down on the line for entire populations.” This was PolicyLink President Michael McAfee’s closing call to action for attendees at the StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network Convening last week. His keynote — which galvanized everyone in the room — was a reminder of what’s at stake and…