|
Goals
- Develop a coordinated communications campaign between the City of Fort Worth, the Arlington Child Care Council, and United Way.
- Develop programs to engage and empower parents
History/Background
The City of Fort Worth participated in NLC's Early Childhood Challenge in 2003. With community partners, city leaders then developed a long-term Community Action Plan with the assistance of NLC's Freddie Mac Foundation Early Childhood Challenge technical assistance project. The Fort Worth City Council approved the plan and authorized the creation of an Early Childhood Matters Council in 2004.
Former Mayor Pro Tem Ralph McCloud was instrumental in the design and approval of the plan, and his position on the City Council helped maintain interest among other elected officials. He will continue to provide leadership as Chair of the Early Childhood Matters Council.
Currently, the Early Childhood Matters Council is using a $25,000 award from Workforce Solutions for Tarrant County, the local workforce development board. The funding supports families and caregivers through community outreach and by providing information and education to parents on supporting their children's healthy development so they can succeed in school.
The two goals of Fort Worth's Cities Supporting Parents of Young Children project come from the Community Action Plan.
Progress Toward Goals
Develop a Coordinated Communications Campaign:
There are three early childhood initiatives in the greater Fort Worth area, and potentially four competing communications campaigns. As part of the CSP initiative, the City of Fort Worth focused on coordinating its messages with the initiatives sponsored by Arlington Child Care Council, United Way, and Touchpoints.
Fort Worth credits the Born Learning Public Education webinar and the YEF Institute's memo on parent education campaigns in their success. The city shared the information from the webinar and the memo with all parties, as well as a communications consultant who was hired to work with the initiatives. They were successful in designing a shared flyer format and a tag line that provides a graphic link between the four groups on joint publications.
Additionally, the groups will continue to collaborate and have agreed to share any research conducted and communication materials developed locally without proprietary ownership. The result is a more coordinated message that leverages the strengths of four groups to improve early care and education throughout the community.
Information from the webinar and memo also provided the context to help in the design of a strong logo for Early Childhood Matters.
Develop Programs to Engage and Empower Parents:
Fort Worth recently received a tremendous boost in its efforts to engage parents with a $687,138 Early Learning Opportunities Act grant (ELOA) from U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. In-kind funds will match the federal share with $124,988. The City of Fort Worth will serve as the project manager for the grant.
Project lead, Kathy Livingston, believes that the city's participation in the Cities Supporting Parents of Young Children project boosted its credibility and helped it to secure this award. In the application, the city team included many of the ideas it heard about in conference calls and YEF Institute meetings.
A major focus of this new work is establishing literacy hubs in existing community centers. These hubs include lending libraries and provide training for parents, family and friend caregivers, and child care providers on activities that promoting early literacy. There was an open house for the first literacy hub on February 14, 2006, and the remaining hubs will open later in the year.
Less than six months into the program, over 150 parents are enrolled and the goal is to train over 300. Parent involvement has been successful, and one of the reasons is because of the Neighborhood Early Childhood Leadership Councils that have been formed around each of the two Resource Centers. The Councils have been used as a major strategy for sustainability of parent involvement and is instrumental in the outstanding performance of the parents.
Other Progress
In the fall of 2005, Fort Worth Mayor Mike Moncrief invited 30 key stakeholders to join an early childhood leadership council. The community responded with positive feedback on the Mayor's involvement in early childhood efforts. Because of local response to the Katrina relief efforts, this meeting was postponed.
However, the rescheduled meeting will have a more focused agenda due to the knowledge learned from the CSP November webinar on how to effectively engage business leaders.
At the end of September, the city, United Way, and other early childhood initiative partners kicked off a Born Learning campaign to further engage the community in learning about early childhood development. At that event, the Mayor Moncrief spoke passionately about the need for children to be ready for school and the importance of partners working together to support parents and caregivers.
The CSP initiative also provided an opportunity for training on the informal "kith and kin" caregiver arrangements used by Hispanic families, which will help make more effective the "kith and kin" training and parent engagement strategies that is a component of the ELOA grant.
Because of the CSP initiative, the city was able to engage actively the program manager of the Early Childhood Department at the Fort Worth Independent School District. The manager attended the CSP cross-site meeting during the 2005 National Summit on Your City's Families, and was able to learn about what is going on in other cities. As a result, she is more actively involved and will provide valuable support for parent engagement strategies, by providing access to the local elementary school parents.
|