How One Community Boosts Cradle to Career Supports
Pima County, Ariz., is getting attention for using Ready by 21 strategies to improve early childhood education and youth development. A new story in the America's Promise spotlight series about Grad Nation Communities explains how the United Way of Tucson and Southern Arizona "coordinates initiatives to ensure that young people are able to make a successful transition to adulthood."
Realizing that efforts to boost high school graduation must start much earlier than high school and involve more than schools, Pima County leaders built a collaboration that focuses on such objectives as promoting early literacy, increasing the quality of out-of-school time programs, supporting parent and teacher education, improving nutrition and oral health education, and enhancing community awareness of the importance of high-quality care and education.
Scaling Up Successful Interventions
Some 30 scholars gathered last month to tackle the challenge of bringing successful interventions to scale.
The Forum and the William T. Grant Foundation facilitated the meeting of the scholars, who comprise a learning community that is studying interventions aimed at improving the settings where young people spend time - including classrooms, youth programs and families. Sessions focused on understanding variations in the impact of programs and issues of dissemination, scale and sustainability. The learning group is producing a series of studies on these issues.
Related to that meeting, in the most recent issue of Pathways magazine, foundation President Bob Granger challenges conventional wisdom about the scaling of interventions, and calls for a deeper understanding of why and under what conditions social interventions work.
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