Advocacy

In order for community partnerships to have a positive collective impact on young people’s lives, federal policies need to support comprehensive, place-based interagency efforts. The Forum for Youth Investment, in partnership with the National Collaboration for Youth, American Institutes for Research, the Campaign for Youth, the Children's Leadership Council and the Aspen Forum for Community Solutions, hosted a webinar to learn about the White House and the Obama Administration’s plans to support such comprehensive efforts for youth in general, and for disconnected youth in particular.

To achieve long-term, systemic change, you have to have demand and buy-in – not just from top decision-makers but also from community members and young people themselves.

This toolkit is a resource for United Ways and their community partners who seek to deepen their out-of-school time efforts so that more young people have access to quality programs.

While an increasing number of afterschool providers have made quality improvement a priority, addressing quality in a systemic way is complicated: It requires research, planning, building consensus, developing resources, managing new processes and sometimes redefining old relationships. Building Citywide Systems for Quality is a how-to guide designed to support the development of quality improvement systems (QIS) in afterschool settings.