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Blogs
Blogs by Forum staff and by leaders around the country about getting young people ready for college, work and life.
Collaboration Conundrums: Why Youth Service Leaders Embrace and Fear Collective Impact Efforts
Karen Pittman
Wednesday, July 23, 2014
I recently spent two hours with afterschool and community leaders in Milwaukee who are joining together to improve the quality and coordination of youth programs in their city. This was the first “lunch and learn” gathering for partners in the initiative, called Beyond the Bell. The informal Q- and-A covered many topics, from social and emotional learning to common core standards, but one strand of questions were particularly telling.
A High-Level Talk About Readiness
Patrick Boyle
Thursday, July 17, 2014
What does it take to get young people ready for life?
It’s not often that you get to listen in as three high-level thinkers in the youth field gather around a table to tackle such a question. That’s what several hundred of us did yesterday.
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Putting the Community into Community Engagement
Karen Pittman
Friday, July 11, 2014
Community. Engagement.
These two words get a lot of air time at the tables where coalition leaders exchange ideas about how to create "needle moving change," whether the topic is childhood obesity, teen pregnancy or college readiness. Every group of leaders believes community engagement is critical to success. Every group laments they don't do it soon enough, often enough, long enough or well enough. Post mortems of community change initiatives frequently cite "lack of community engagement or buy-in" as a reason for failure.
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My Brother's Keeper: A Need to Focus
Karen Pittman
Thursday, July 10, 2014
Angela Glover Blackwell, CEO of PolicyLink, recently shared her thoughts on the My Brother's Keeper initiative, which was designed by the Obama Administration to address opportunity gaps faced by young men of color to ensure they have the necessary supports to succeed. In her blog posting, Blackwell reasons that, when done correctly, strategies that are targeted at a specific group can benefit all in the long run.
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Intermediary Organizations: Reasons they Fail, Reasons they Succeed
Karen Pittman
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
The final edition of my interview with Sam Piha, a veteran of the afterschool field and founder of Temescal Associates, who recently developed a paper on intermediaries for Putnam Consulting Group and The Cleveland Foundation. See a list of the previous questions and answers posted below.