Ready by 21 Road Tour - Summer/Fall 2006
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Press Contact:
Thaddeus Ferber
202-207-3333
thaddeus@ForumFYI.org
Washington, DC, September 11, 2006 – The Forum for Youth Investment, an active member of the America’s Promise Alliance and a leading resource for state and local leaders dedicated to improving child and youth outcomes, is “walking the talk” this summer and fall – making good on the organization’s commitment to “move ideas to impact” to help communities increase their “horsepower” for change. As partial fulfillment of the organization’s pledge as an Alliance member, co-founders Karen Pittman and Merita Irby are helping to kick off each of the five Regional Forums the Alliance is sponsoring as a part of its 100 Best Communities Campaign by taking turns leading two-hour interactive keynote discussions that challenge community teams to better coordinate efforts to improve policies, programs and public awareness.
“Research suggests that only four in ten young people are ready for college, work and life,” says Irby, co-author of Urban Sanctuaries and manager of the Forum’s Ready by 21 Learning Network. “Changing these odds in communities requires making fundamental changes in the way they do business. Fragmented or piecemeal efforts are not enough. Communities have to create effective ways to add up and assess what they currently do before adding on new programs or policies that may not meet youth and family needs.”
“Communities have to bring more precision to their passion,” says Pittman, one of the country’s most well-respected youth advocates who has made a career of creating bridging relationships between research, practice and policy. “Leaders, by definition, are individuals who take initiative. Unchecked, however, the result is too many initiatives that confuse the public and policy makers. We have to focus on specifics – increasing after-school programs, expanding early childhood supports – in order to get things done. But without a common sense of the big picture of the outcomes we want for youth and the supports we expect from communities, these individual efforts lead to fragmented services and frustrated families. The Forum helps communities focus on the forest and the trees.”
The Ready by 21 Challenge encourages all community leaders – from mayors to program directors to young people – to understand the connection between youth outcomes, community supports, and effective leadership. One of the opening slides shows large, medium and small gears with the smallest being leadership. “We all know that the small gears move the fastest” says Pittman. “But when they are connected to the larger gears, their movement makes a big difference. Giving community leaders the conceptual and practical tools they need to create Big Tent partnerships that assume shared accountability for a comprehensive set of Big Picture goals and then implement the change strategies needed to achieve Big Impact results for youth is what the Challenge is all about.”
“We’ve developed a set of ideas and tools that help community leaders think differently, act differently and act together,” says Irby. “The response from community leaders, business leaders, elected officials, advocates, program directors and, last but not least, young people themselves has been amazing.”
Pittman and Irby are providing community teams with a taste of what might happen if they incorporated the principles of Big Picture thinking into their planning and took on the Ready by 21 Challenge to assess and strengthen their capacity to coordinate and sustain needed changes in programs and policies. Regional Forum participants are provided with sample Ready by 21 workbooks, engaged in discussion about the potential impact of bringing these ideas into their assessment and planning processes, and encouraged to try out some of the exercises at their tables.
The response thus far, has been terrific. The common complaint: Not enough time.
“Karen's presentation of the Ready by 21 strategy was the highlight of the forum; tying together the various sectors of youth service professionals and aiming us at the mutual intention of preparing our youth for school, work and life," says Cynthia Fogg, superintendent of City Wide Youth Services in Long Beach who helped orchestrate the first regional forum held in Long Beach in June. Long Beach is in the process of preparing a Youth Master Plan and is considering using the Ready by 21 Challenge to guide its planning process.
Providence, Rhode Island Mayor David N. Cicilline, who hosted the second Regional Forum, said Karen’s discussion “about the urgent need for a system-wide approach to helping our youth and improving their outcomes is aligned with what we are doing with our afterschool initiative – PASA – the Providence After School Alliance.” Hillary Salmons, head of PASA, said that the presentation specifically helped her and her staff get a full picture of what’s needed for youth. “Our staff really felt as if they were able to get a bigger picture view of what’s needed for youth, and see a new perspective on where after school readiness fits in,” says Salmons. They recognize that preparing young people for college, work and life “cannot be the sole responsibility of the school system,” so the Forum’s ideas and strategies for how to integrate community partners with the agenda of the school system was beneficial. “We do work to build systems [of after school support] in middle schools…the Ready by 21 Roadmap gave us the confidence and boost to connect with high schools,” says Salmons.
Irby will kick-off the upcoming regional forums in Charlotte on September 14th and 15th and Indianapolis on September 28th and 29th. Pittman will reappear to do the final forum in Denver on October 12th and 13th. These upcoming forums not only provide the Forum an opportunity to share the Big Picture Approach and explain the Ready by 21 Challenge with other communities, they also provide communities that have already begun to use the approach an opportunity to share their stories about how it works.
"We're particularly excited about the upcoming forum in Charlotte," says Irby. Charlotte is one of the cities that has participated in the Forum's Ready by 21 Learning Group and was just recently selected as one of nine cities that will be working with the Forum, the Public Education Network, and the American Association of School Administrators to strengthen their community education partnership by incorporating even more of the Ready by 21 principles into their work.
Jacque Douglas, director of Bartholomew County’s Council for Youth Development, is excited about the prospect of sharing their success at the Indianapolis forum. “Our county’s core leadership group reviewed other planning processes and selected Ready by 21 because of its focus on Big Picture planning, developmental approach, and broad community stakeholder engagement. The Forum’s coaching has been wonderful. This is not cookie cutter training and technical assistance. They engage us in the principles, listen to our needs and then assist us in creating the tools to achieve success. We’ve just released our first annual report. We’re incredibly proud of the work we have done and the strong partnerships we’ve developed as a result of the process.”
“We’re delighted by the strong response, but not surprised” says Kris Minor, senior vice president of Alliance Partnerships. “Last November, Karen spoke to the winners of the 1st annual 100 Best Communities Contest at the national event. She congratulated them on being among the best but said she knew that each could do much better. She encouraged them not to rest on their laurels but to use this national recognition to go back home and redouble their efforts. It was at that moment that she pledged that the Forum would work with America’s Promise to help them strengthen their capacity. We know what a gift it is to have Karen and Merita on the road with us at each of these regional forums. These are the kind of commitments from our Alliance members that make us confident that, together, the Alliance will achieve its goal to change the lives of 15 million young people.”
Pittman has worked with the Alliance since its inception almost 10 years ago. She and Rick Little, founder and then President of the International Youth Foundation, worked with General Colin Powell to ensure that the goals and structure of the Alliance would be created to build on the enormous momentum that came out of the 1997 President’s Summit for America’s Future.
“The America’s Promise Alliance has done a brilliant job of hammering home the message that every young person needs a basic set of supports, that too few have them and that the goal isn’t simply to get a few more young people a few more supports, but to ensure that every young person has all five of the fundamental resources needed to grow and develop,” said Pittman in her opening remarks at each forum.
Referring again to the three connected gears that create change, Pittman suggests that the Alliance has set a standard for communications and coalition building around the five promises that needs to be replicated now for the other two gears – youth outcomes and effective leadership.
The Alliance has given the country common language and is giving them common metrics for the middle gear – community supports. We now need to do the same for the other two gears.
We can’t pick and choose our favorite youth outcomes. Children who are healthy, safe and ready for school become teens who are ready for college, work and life. Immunization rates, pregnancy rates, high school graduation rates, suicide rates are useful indicators of child and youth well-being, but they are not the end goal. The end goal is that by age 21, if not before, young people are ready for college, work and life. The developmental goals are that at ages 5, 10, 15, they are on track in learning, thriving, connecting, contributing and, yes, even working (having parents who work, understand career options, demonstrate good work habits).
And, it is equally important to understand that we can’t pick and choose our favorite leadership initiatives to the exclusion of others. This is the hardest message to get across, but is the easiest place to make real progress. With a common vision and a shared sense of accountability, community leaders, sometimes within a matter of months, can change the ways they set priorities, map effort, measure success, coordinate services and programs, allocate resources, communicate information, orchestrate advocacy efforts and engage youth and families.
The Forum for Youth Investment and America’s Promise both understand that a two-hour session can inspire but not really instruct. This is why they are teaming up to create a series of “take the lessons home” opportunities for Regional Forum participants and other leaders from the 100 Best Communities who were unable to attend one of the Regional Forums.
- PDF versions of the power point presentation will be posted shortly on the Forum’s web site and will be on the America’s Promise web site soon.
- Regional Forum attendees who answer a short questionnaire about their community planning process and how they might integrate the Ready by 21 Challenge into their work can receive a PDF copy of the workbook.
- Attendees interested in learning more about the planning and assessment process and how they can receive training or bring the process to their communities can sign-up to be notified of the dates for “take the lessons home” audio-conferences.
- Attendees interested in hearing more about how communities and states have actually used the tools can sign up for the Ready by 21 Changing the Odds newsletter that will be started up this fall.