Southeast Communities Working to Improve Quality in Youth Programming

The Ready by 21 National Partnership is sponsoring the Quality Improvement & Asset Building Challenge Grants (Q&A Challenge) in three southeast communities: Wicomico County, MD; Asheville, NC; and Ft. Myers, FL. Each network has recruited a wide range of youth-serving organizations, including Boys & Girls Clubs, YMCA/YWCA, Parks & Recreation departments and 21st CCLC programs, with the United Way also an active partner in Asheville and Fort Myers.
 
The Q&A Challenge represents an advance in community level efforts to align out-of-school time programmatic resources with community-specific profiles of developmental assets. The Challenge brings together the Search Institute’s Developmental Assets Profile (DAP) and the David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality’s Youth Program Quality Assessment (Youth PQA) to help communities systematically assess developmental assets in a population of children and youth, then improve the quality of out-of-school time settings for those young people.
 
Early findings from a network capacity audit showed a great deal of interest in supporting youth and youth programs, but highlighted gaps in services that the Q&A Challenge can play a primary role in addressing. 
To view the full announcement, please click here