New Materials

Ready Partners: Help with Promise Grants, Dropout Prevention Fund, Changing Communities

Forum Flash: Afterschool quality, boosting student achievement, state-level

Ready Partners: Corp. Voices' impact, new youth newsletter, new Promise grants

Ready Partners: Surveying Community/Business Partnerships, 100 Best Communities, Prepping for Big Tent

Ready by 21 Ideas, Graduation and Job Skills, the Value of Youth Programs

This is a story about how city leaders engaged their entire community to create a shared vision for their youth and a master plan to carry out that vision. Today that vision and plan, established in conjunction with the Forum for Youth Investment’s Ready by 21® strategies, provide the framework for delivering Nashville’s youth services and supports.

This is a story about how a community built a state-of-the-art online tool to map and track youth services. Community leaders in Austin are using this tool to improve services and make them more accessible to families in need.

Leaders at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn have changed the way they do business and as a result, increased student success.

America is making progress in reducing a nationwide crisis in the number of students who drop out of high school.

On Dec. 10, the Women’s Leadership Council of the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta made Ready by 21 the focus of its annual "Coffee & Community" breakfast.

With the goal of aligning federal policies with state and local efforts on the ground, the Forum for Youth Investment, in partnership with Corporate Voices for Working Families, launched the Ready by 21® Policy Coalition in 2010.

The Ready by 21 Policy Coalition advocates for policies that advance a seamless continuum of supports—from cradle to college and career.

On October 27 & 28, the Forum for Youth Investment will offer a Ready by 21 Institute, hosted by the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta in Atlanta, GA.

In this issue, we lead with a new analysis, by the Forum for Youth Investment, of several newly released reports on child well-being. The paper outlines how tools such as the Ready by 21 Developmental Dashboard can help leaders be effective. The paper includes commentary on well-being report cards can measure results across outcome areas and ages.

This inspiring 12-minute video documents how the Georgetown Divide, a small community in the Sierra foothills of Northern California has embraced a positive youth development approach across the settings where youth spend time and has anchored that commitment through widespread use of the Youth Program Quality Assessment.

SparkAction officially launched in June! The Forum is proud to be managing this collaborative effort for and by the child and youth field to mobilize a large, well-informed constituency to spark action for change.

Each issue of READY PICKS focuses on one or more of “the 4 Bs” – the capacities leaders need to strengthen to do business differently, and offers our best picks of research, tools and examples selected from the work of Ready by 21 Partners, Ready by 21 places and others committed to big picture change.

Ready by 21 is a strategy that helps communities improve the odds that all youth will be ready for college, work and life. Ready by 21 meets leaders where they are, challenges them to think and work differently, and helps them progress further and faster to deliver results for youth.

May 2010
By Karen Pittman

Column time: I reached for the “recent research” inbox and pulled out five studies – three national surveys, two major evaluations – and started to read, looking for common themes. Good stuff.

All young people need to be prepared to succeed in college, work and life. But in our country, only four out of ten are ready for a productive adulthood, and two in ten are in serious trouble.

Every community and state has dedicated leaders who have taken on the critical task of bringing diverse people and disparate efforts together in order to transform their community or state into a wonderful place to grow up.

Ready by 21 isn’t a program or a campaign or even an initiative. It is a challenge to all who care about children and youth to think differently – to learn a different way to approach all of the tasks associated with trying to manage, make or measure change at any level from the classroom to the capitol – so that they can act differently.

The Institute for Learning Innovation defines free choice learning as “learning that fulfills the lifelong human quest for knowledge, understanding and personal fulfillment.” Heady words.

Welcome to the Ready by 21 Webinar Series!

Ready by 21 isn't a program or a campaign or even an initiative.

We've got exciting news this month! We're proud to announce our Ready by 21 Video and Brochure – these are great resources that lay out in a simple way the Ready by 21 Challenge, Approach and Partnership. In the video, hear the story of leaders in Richmond using Ready by 21 to improve their community.

Effective leadership for changing the odds for children and youth requires motivating a number of distinct groups to act. It is essential for leaders to develop an aligned and focused advocacy and communications strategy that articulates and builds demand for changing the odds for children and youth.

On any given day, scores of young people with limited individual and social capital are simultaneously struggling to exit some systems and enter others: foster care, residential treatment centers, higher education, mental health programs, gainful employment.

This commentary takes readers on a cross-country tour of after-school innovation – from northern and southern California to Chicago, New York and New Hampshire. In On the Ground we describe two very different school-based models in California.

Program quality assessment and improvement continue to be central themes in the after-school and youth development fields. In March 2007 we released the first edition of this report comparing the purpose, history, structure, methodology, content and technical properties of different program observation tools.

There are numerous child and youth development frameworks being used by youth serving organizations and government entities. A common vision and framework allow for better mission and resource alignment, more precise measurement of progress and provide a useful tool for communicating goals and strategies to the public, families and youth, funders, policy makers and community stakeholders.

Ready by 21 isn’t a program or a campaign or even an initiative. It is a challenge to all who care about children and youth to think differently – to learn a different way to approach all of the tasks associated with trying to manage, make or measure change at any level from the classroom to the capitol – so that they can act differently.

This commentary highlights the work of the Collaborative for Building After-School Systems, a collaborative of mature, city and county-wide nonprofit OST intermediaries, to develop and adopt common youth-, program- and system-level measures that are easy and cost-effective for local systems to implement.

Across the country, too few youth leave high school ready for success. Community statistics and conditions vary, but there is no community across the country that is doing well enough by its children and youth. There is a need to do more. More to the point, there is a need to do better – to make bolder commitments, to create broader ownership and partnerships, to ensure greater returns on public and private investments.

The Forum for Youth Investment convened a group of key stakeholders in Louisville, KY at the Neighborhood House in an effort to assist these community and state leaders with aligning their youth efforts into a big picture framework.

The America’s Promise Alliance is supporting 50 state and at least 50 city Dropout Prevention Summits to be held by 2010. The purposes of the Dropout Prevention Summits are many, but the primary intention is to increase public awareness of the dropout and college-readiness crisis.

On May 15, Karen Pittman moderated a panel – Preparing Youth for Success in a Global Economy – at the Community Leaders Conference hosted by United Way of America in Baltimore. Karen spoke about the Ready by 21 framework data on youth readiness that can be applied to work supporting youth.

On May 8, Karen Pittman traveled to Mason City, Iowa where she delivered the keynote at the first annual Adolescent Youth Workers Summit that kicked off Mason City's participation in the Ready by 21 Quality Counts Initiative. There, Karen spoke to over 100 youth work practitioners and community leaders about the importance of improving the quality and reach of youth programs.

The six partners who in 2007 made formal commitments to work with the Forum to advance the Ready by 21 Challenge represent the education, government, nonprofit, business and community philanthropy sectors. Below are featured clips from the partner panel discussion at the National Launch in Washington, DC.

Ready by 21 isn't a program or a campaign or even an initiative. It is a challenge to all who care about children and youth to learn a different approach to the tasks associated with trying to manage, make or measure change at any level from the classroom to the capitol.

The six partners who in 2007 made formal commitments to work with the Forum to advance the Ready by 21 Challenge represent the education, government, nonprofit, business and community philanthropy sectors. Each was chosen because they had pledged to do business differently and sought out the Forum to help in some way.

Find the answers to the most frequently asked questions about Ready by 21 and the Ready by 21 Challenge.

The Council for Youth Development is a local coalition, supported by a successful, nationally-recognized program.  The Council includes our school systems, youth-serving agencies, government, United Way and scores of agencies dedicated to helping prepare our children to be healthy, successful members of society.

The Forum for Youth Investment has partnered with Corporate Voices for Working Families to support a Youth Transitions Task Force charged with identifying and promoting the corporate and public policies necessary to ensure that young people ages 14-21 have the opportunities to develop the skills and knowledge needed to be successful in work and in life.

Part of the Ready by 21® Change Makers in Action Series, this case study describes the work done by the United Way and the Unite-LA/L.A. Chamber partnership in Los Angeles.

READY BY 21: Taking Aim on the Big Picture describes the basic process that can be used by cities, states, funders and programs to coordinate their policies and services to support young people and their families. This tool is the "closet organizer" of youth policy.

In the past, much attention has been paid to the leaks in the “education pipeline”, but now employers, youth and communities are focusing on repairing the “work pipeline” to ensure that young people are ready for work by age 21

Part of the Ready by 21® Change Makers in Action Series, this case study describes the work done by the Iowa Collaboration for Youth Development.

The Council for Youth Development is the third generation of community work in Bartholomew County, Indiana, focusing on children and youth. The Council has as its ultimate goal every child in the county being Ready by 21™ – ready for learning, ready for work, ready for life.

In March 2006 the Forum along with NGA and the New Mexico Children's Cabinet hosted the second annual Children's Cabinet Roundtable in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Eight states participated in the Roundtable and discussed their progress in coordinating resources, collaborating on strategies, and convening key players in improving outcomes for children and youth.

There are multiple types of information that are needed to translate goals into action effectively - information on children and youth, programs, policies, public and political will. This one-page handout provides a list of common ways that states and communities “take stock.”