Core Strategies
An emerging lesson from this initiative is the need to develop and strengthen within the Making Connections neighborhoods “pipelines” and “pathways” to jobs, assets, and supports that will help ensure children are healthy and prepared to succeed in school. For the past several years, sites have worked with a broad range of local partners – including employers, banks, city government, community-based groups, local funders, schools, and others -- to launch prototypes of these strategies. For example:
- All sites are building robust workforce pipelines from the initiative neighborhoods to regional economic engines -- such as health care and the construction trades – to increase family earnings and income. These pipelines have a neighborhood-focused approach to job recruitment, referrals, employer partnerships, career training, retention, and advancement services. The pipelines also put special emphasis on training and job development strategies for highly vulnerable populations , such as formerly incarcerated persons, TANF recipients, residents of public housing and immigrant and refugee families who need English as a Second Language (ESL)programs.
- Sites are using similar strategies to help families build savings and accumulate assets. A range of local partners are developing neighborhood focused outreach, counseling and coaching efforts, coordinating access to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), financial education, credit repair, and homeownership programs, and helping families set both short- and long-term goals. In addition, residents and other local partners are working together to combat predatory lending and attract new financial institutions, such as community credit unions, to the Making Connections neighborhoods.
- To close wide gaps in third grade reading scores – the point at which most children should be “reading to learn, not learning to read” – between the Making Connections neighborhoods and the surrounding counties, site are coordinating a range of strategies along a pathway to promote healthy child development and success at school. Using a data-driven approach, sites “map backward” from the desired result of increasing third grade reading proficiency to identify the supports and services children and their families need on the way toward that goal. Once again, Making Connections emphasizes a family and neighborhood focus, mobilizing communities in support of quality early childhood development, and supporting parents as their children’s first teachers and best advocates. In addition, these pathways to assuring that the children are healthy and prepared to succeed in school help focus community partners – including health and child care providers, schools, local early childhood initiatives (such as United Way’s Success by Six campaign) and local businesses – on specific steps along that pathway. These steps may include: (1) expanding access to health care; (2) increasing early childhood care and education services; (3) working with resident and parent leaders to help connect families to high quality child care providers, family literacy programs, and other resources; and (4) promoting successful transitions to schools, ensuring schools are ready to teach in the early grades and children arrive ready to learn.
Helping families increase earnings and build assets, promoting resident engagement and strong social network, and ensuring that children are healthy and prepared for success in school, are important results in and of themselves. Yet Casey believes strategies to achieve these results most overlap and reinforce one another to finally “turn the curve” on improving child and family outcomes in tough neighborhoods. For example, Making Connections sites are learning that many families with young children need not only access to quality childcare but also connections to job training, asset building, and career advancement programs. Many participants in the initiative’s workforce efforts need connections to informal social networks that help them find out about job opportunities and training programs.