Building from the March and April monthly meeting, the E2C Coalition in-person convening on May 21st reviewed the collectively determined milestones by working group and created then assigned action items with due dates.
All of these tasks and contextual information was input on a tracker accessible to all coalition members. This will be the road map for each working group (Early Childhood, Literacy, Utilizing Schools As Hubs, and Continuous Learning & Workforce). Early childhood looked at the connection between services and the ability to partner with the Schools as Hubs working group. Coalition partners in the 'Literacy' workgroup designated next steps to capture baseline data, pulling from existing resources.
​​First, with 'Schools As Hubs’ Dr. Jesse Watson shared with the coalition all the community partnerships Discovery has welcomed onto the campus as the pilot for this work. Still working on doing landscape assessment. We really want to find a way to get as much information about who is doing work in schools, who's doing services, what are they providing? There's a lot of different people who are in schools. So what was the track to get there and how's it working out? Also getting feedback from principals in this landscape assessment. We're looking at expanding digital access considering what it looks like as K 12 spaces for learners and making those accessible to others.
The ‘Continuous Learning’ work group closed out several milestones in Q2 and made progress on the SWOT analysis as well as identifying funding for the workforce continuum. During the May convening the work group focused a lot at the beginning of the workforce journey - the youth of the city. We challenged the approach inflicted upon the young people as they come through the education system with their voice being nowhere at the table. It also challenged the way that messages are delivered to students, whether it's around summer internships whether it's around any kind of opportunities in the workforce outside the traditional pathway of going to college. The message and oftentimes the messenger seem to be off. Tone deaf and often not culturally competent yet we wonder why we continue to run through the same issues over and over with a depleting workforce. That workforce continuum really gets disrupted and it gets disrupted really early on.
Made great strides with the ‘Early Childhood Education’ working group.
Distinguished the difference between early childhood education and primary education. We had a few educators sitting at the table. Some of them were daycare providers and others were PK three and kindergarten, and they were just speaking on how Children who are entering into Pre-K and kindergarten don't have the basic foundations of education. The 123s and ABCs. We also talked about our statewide efforts. Geaux Far Louisiana is a great partner that we're doing some work with because they're working on the advocacy level. Scan is another organization that has partnered with One Rouge in terms of bringing us information as it relates to policy around early childhood.
The 'Raising Literacy Rates' workgroup continues to make great progress by gathering resources and documents that create a baseline for literacy in the community. The champions in this working group are close to finishing several more milestones and have a summer of work to do to take action on ideas that have been percolating since January. Lot of great work on the horizon of this group as new partners are being engaged to strengthen the data and practitioner participation of E2C.
At the conclusion of the May in-person convening, there was the first cross-working group collaboration between ‘Early Childhood’ and ‘Schools As Hubs’. This intersectional work strikes at the heart of Collective Impact 3.0 and is yet another sign that the coalition is moving in the right direction together.
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