Guest blog post by Sarah Clarke, director of government affairs at Hylden Advocacy & Law. Photo above: Rep. Rena Moran, holding microphone, speaks on a panel with Northside Achievement Zone and Saint Paul Promise Neighborhood parents. When communities work together at a state level, they can get powerful results for kids and families. Recent policy work…
Guest blog post by Kimberly Thomas, Parents as Teachers manager at Porter-Leath Through the Prenatal to Age 3 Impact and Improvement Network, I had the opportunity to help impact home visitation in Memphis and Shelby County, Tennessee. The Impact and Improvement Network is a collaboration of communities from across the country building strategies to improve…
By Alexis Canalos-Castillo, director of coaching, and Tanisha Pleasant, director of Accelerator Fund programs More than 30 people from across the StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network gathered in Chicago last month to develop strategies to improve outcomes in school and in life for children and youth of color. During the Racial Equity and Inclusion Convening:…
In 2013, 50 public schools closed in Chicago — the largest mass public school closure in the history of the United States. Of the 10,400 students affected, 88% were African American. Last week, sociologist of education Eve L. Ewing shared insights from this event with Cradle to Career Network members gathered to deepen their work…
With support from Mission: Graduate, a new state law passed that requires New Mexico schools to prevent students from missing too much class time. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham signed House Bill 236 into law this spring, with unanimous approval from the House and the Senate. This policy win comes after five years spent…
13.7 million and counting: StriveTogether’s very first annual report details the Cradle to Career Network impact on 13.7 million children across 29 states and Washington, D.C., last year. And while the report highlights outcomes improving for children across our Network, we know this is just a start in our work to ensure every child can…
Above: Kelly, left, as a child with her family, looking forward to a vacation in Hawaii. Why All Hands Raised is challenging how educators think about skilled trade professions I still vividly recall the heart-to-heart conversation my father had with me long ago about college. He never went to college or graduated from high school.…
“Trust comes from truth telling,” Hanh Cao Yu from the California Endowment said from the plenary stage at the Grantmakers for Effective Organizations Learning Conference last week in Seattle. Her words rang true from multiple perspectives. As I’ve learned in my work with communities across the country applying StriveTogether’s collaborative improvement approach, one of the most…
Guest post by Jon McGoh, co-founder and a trustee at Reach Academy in Feltham, England. For three weeks this spring, I was fortunate enough to tour the U.S. visiting a variety of cradle-to-career initiatives on a Winston Churchill Fellowship. The Fellowship enables UK citizens to travel the world looking at innovative solutions to the world’s…
Guest blog post by Linda T. Francis, director of Success of All Youth. Oak Park, Ill., is an aspirational community, touted by residents as a diverse and progressive place where all people can live and thrive together. But despite efforts to promote Oak Park’s legacy of integration, ongoing discrepancies in student achievement tell another story:…
I showed up on StriveTogether’s doorstep as a social worker. I knew I wanted to support organizations to do better for kids and families, but I didn’t know how important a human services orientation would be in the work we do with our Cradle to Career Network every day. And now, which likely comes as…
Last summer I got an email from David Brooks of The New York Times. He had heard about StriveTogether’s approach to building community-based partnerships and wanted to visit our partners in Spartanburg to see the approach in action. After spending an afternoon with Spartanburg Academic Movement, he reached back out to me to talk about…