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Staff profile: Kelli Crawford

Kelli Crawford joined Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) as Continuous Quality Improvement Manager earlier this year. Previously, Kelli served as the Director of Impact at Junior Achievement of the Triad. In that role, she built relationships with school districts, educators, and volunteers across five counties to inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy.

Overseeing the Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) program allows Crawford to connect with Guilford County programs that focus on serving families with young children.

“As someone who’s a lifelong learner and focuses on ways to grow and improve, working with these programs to help them increase their efficiency, quality, and service is a natural fit,” Crawford said.

The CQI process uses the Model for Improvement, a powerful and flexible method promoting a structured experiential learning approach. The 13 organizations in CQI Cohort II began their work in September and will finish the process in May 2023. Their team-based work will help them collect, analyze, and use data to improve service quality.

“We’re working with three to four team members in each organization,” Crawford said. “Each month, the programs participate in learning sessions with each other and CQI facilitators from the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work and Population Health Improvement Partners. The CQI members receive additional coaching between sessions and have time to complete any assignments.”

When she’s not helping local organizations create new ways to improve, Crawford says she enjoys spending time in nature and expanding her photography skills. She and her husband are avid campers and enjoy exploring North Carolina, from the mountains to the beaches.

“My husband’s family introduced me to camping, and I fell in love with it, too,” Crawford said. “During the pandemic, we bought a small camper to continue exploring and find safe ways to continue our travels.”

While camping in North Carolina allows for quick getaways, a recent trip to Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming inspired Crawford’s photography. “I’ve used some of the photos I took there in my office to remind me of that trip,” she said. “It’s a great way to bring the outdoors indoors.”

Partner Spotlight: Room At The Inn

Room At The Inn is a comprehensive program that helps homeless, single, and pregnant women with or without previous children. The organization provides shelter, food, clothing, case management, in-house daycare, transportation, life skills education, and more.

“We have two main goals, which are the healthy birth of the baby and for them to find stable housing when they leave,” said Marianne Donadio, vice president of marketing and development. “Some of them have additional goals such as getting a driver’s license, a GED, or other skills, so we help them with their needs.”

During their stay at Room At The Inn, the expectant parents work towards their goals each week. Up to six pregnant people and up to four children can live at the center, according to state regulations.

“We also have a house next door, Amy’s House, that we use for mothers who’ve graduated but who want to complete their education. We provide child care and housing for them while they work on their degree,” Donadio said. “As you can imagine, having a bachelor’s degree is significant and allows parents to plan to support their family in the years ahead.”

Whether a short-term or long-term stay, Room At The Inn, all residents can participate in an aftercare program. For some, it’s just the first few months, but others stay in touch for years after they move out on their own.

“We want them to remain stable,” Donadio said. “So whether we offer a child care scholarship that fills in the gaps while they wait for vouchers, a short-term small financial loan if they’ve been sick and had to miss work, or material assistance with formula, clothes, or groceries, it’s enough to keep them going.”

Room At The Inn is part of Ready for School, Ready for Life’s Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Cohort II. “The environment is continuously changing, and what may have worked when we opened our doors in 2001 may have shifted. Having been through COVID-19 has been a big example of that. Our CQI partnership with Ready Ready will help us improve our processes and more efficiently accomplish our goals.”

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Staff profile: Stephanie Skordas

Stephanie Skordas celebrated her second anniversary as Ready Ready’s director of marketing and communications last month. She joined our organization after more than ten years of working in higher education strategic communications in a neighboring county, and shortly after the pandemic transitioned everyone to online education, including her youngest daughter in middle school.

“I had an appreciation for the steps Guilford County Schools was taking to help make the transition after seeing how a private, liberal arts university had to pivot so quickly,” Skordas said. “That reignited my passion for early childhood education.”

A former marketing director at the Greensboro Children’s Museum, now Miriam P. Brenner Children’s Museum, Skordas brought some of the lessons she learned from her mother, a former preschool teacher turned mental health counselor, to her communications efforts. “She has a way of making a story come alive, and understanding what children need to succeed from the very beginning,” Skordas said, “and I saw how she made a difference in her students’ lives before they started kindergarten.”

While her work at Ready Ready runs the gamut from monthly newsletters, to website updates, social media, media relations, public will-building, and more, Skordas says she values the principles Ready Ready weaves through all its work. “The focus on being family-led, inclusive, equity-driven, responsive to evidence, transparent, and collaborative is critical to the system-building work we’re doing,” she said. “As a former journalist, I feel so strongly about how communities that are aware and informed can make amazing strides together.”

When she’s not creating written or multimedia content for Ready Ready, you can find this flamingo aficionado chaperoning for the Page High School Band, volunteering with the PTSA, or crashing on the sofa reading, watching movies, playing video games, crocheting, or scrapbooking. She and her husband have two daughters and two cats.

Partner Spotlight: The Barnabas Network

You have probably heard about food banks, but what about a furniture bank? The Barnabas Network is a nonprofit furniture bank based right here in Guilford County.

“Barnabas started in 2005 as a grassroots response to natural disasters,” said Judy Caldwell, The Barnabas Network’s marketing and development manager. “Local faith groups, community-minded volunteers, and other organizations realized there was a gap in services here for folks starting over, resettling, fleeing violence, transitioning out of homelessness, or breaking the cycle of poverty.” The next year, the organization gained nonprofit status.

Caldwell noted that while service agencies were helping to find stable housing, furnishing these living spaces was frequently beyond a family’s means. “Today, we serve more than 2,700 people a year – about 800 to 1,000 families.”

The Barnabas Network collects new and gently-used furniture, about 8,000 pieces a year, from donors in the community. “We honor your well-loved items, those pieces of furniture that have reached the end of the road in your home but still have a lot of life left in them. We share them to help make a house a home for someone who is starting over.”

The Barnabas Network is moving into a new strategic planning phase of its work and has partnered with Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) as part of its Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Cohort II.

“We have bold visions in terms of expanding and becoming a national model and believe the work we’re doing with Ready Ready’s CQI process will help us capture the metrics around the impact we’re having. We were so thrilled to be chosen.” Caldwell said. “We have anecdotal evidence and some metrics to capture the impact, but having more data will help us become a teaching model for furniture banks in the United States and around the globe.”

Ready for School, Ready for Life Adds Strategies Focused on Children Ages 3-5

(Greensboro, N.C., October 13, 2022) – Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) has selected community partners to pilot strategies focused on families with children ages 3-5 in Guilford County. A design team of diverse community stakeholders from Guilford County developed ten strategies designed to improve services for these children and their families. Three strategies will be piloted starting this month:

● Implement a countywide active reading effort to improve children’s early literacy skills.

● Improve adult and children’s social-emotional development by expanding evidence-based interventions.

● Enhance the pre-K to kindergarten transition.

“We are excited to recognize our community partners as we add strategies for families with children ages 3-5 to our system-building work,” said Ready Ready CEO Charrise Hart. “By focusing on early literacy, the transition to kindergarten, and mental health for social-emotional development, we are building on the impact we’ve created by assessing needs for families with children prenatal to age 3. We want every child born in Guilford County in 2023 and beyond to enter kindergarten on track and find success in school by third grade, which is a critical milestone for their future.”

Ready Ready has selected these evidence-based programs and partner agencies for this important work:

Reading Connections will implement the Motheread/Fatheread curriculum with parents and caregivers who are strengthening their own literacy skills. This curriculum creates literacy-rich home environments and encourages shared reading between adults and children.

The United Way of Greater Greensboro will offer Raising a Reader through a collaboration with Guilford County School’s North Carolina Pre-kindergarten classrooms. Lessons learned from the pilot in the 2022-23 school year will inform the expansion of the program countywide to additional early childhood classrooms.

The Kellin Foundation will facilitate the Community Resiliency Model (CRM). This intervention can be used with families and other professionals, such as early childhood educators, to promote awareness of stress triggers and teach skills that can manage emotional reactions. There is a specific focus on the impact of trauma when implementing strategies to promote healthy reactions to stress.

Family Service of the Piedmont will implement Triple P – Positive Parenting Program – in one of Guilford County’s census tracts in High Point with high rates of poverty. Triple P offers a range of supports for families, ranging from general parenting education to interventions for specific social-emotional challenges children may experience.

The YWCA-High Point will conduct work with Parents as Teachers to enhance parent and caregiver skills around social-emotional development through home visits and group activities. By reaching families in the home, parent educators are able to provide support and education to families with a specific focus on preparing for kindergarten entry.

The research is clear – positive experiences earlier in life help children build a strong foundation and grow into socially and emotionally healthy kids who are confident and empathetic. Positive experiences early in children’s lives promote healthy physical development throughout the body. Negative experiences early in life can lead to long-term health problems such as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and mental health challenges.

“As a backbone organization, Ready Ready works with experienced community partners and evidence-based programs to expand and integrate services like these with the goal of ensuring more Guilford County families have access,” Hart said. “We are building a connected, innovative system of care to support families and their children from the very beginning. We cannot expect a healthier, more resilient, more prosperous community if we don’t invest in our future.”

About Ready for School, Ready for Life

Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization working to create a connected, innovative system of care for Guilford County’s youngest children and their families. Our goal is to build a replicable model to share across North Carolina and other states. Learn more at www.GetReadyGuilford.org.

Media contact: Stephanie Skordas, stephanies@getreadyguilford.org.

Staff profile: Connie Colter

Ready for School, Ready for Life Parent Liaison Connie Colter came to our organization through the Guilford Parent Leader Network (GPLN) and its Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI)training.

“I empower families to make a difference within Guilford County and also offer them support,” Colter said. “I build one-on-one relationships with GPLN families and encourage other families in Guilford County to join our group. It’s so important to have a support system as a parent.”

They say if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. Colter is currently earning her degrees in special education and criminal justice while parenting five children and working at Ready Ready. Her long-term goal is to provide quality education to juvenile delinquents by starting a school for them. She intends to get to the root of the problem instead of watching them get passed along the system.

“Once they have the label ‘juvenile delinquent’, it sticks with them for the rest of their educational life,” Colter said. “These children don’t receive the standard quality of education and this causes a greater issue. What would happen if we took the time to understand the root of why they may have lashed out or committed a crime and help them work past it?”

Colter says her interest in education and social justice comes from her mother’s 30-year career working with children who have exceptional needs. “Growing up learning not to judge people, but looking beyond what society may say about them is so important,” Colter said. “I learned to give back and treat people how you’d want to be treated if you were in their shoes.”

When she’s not studying, writing and submitting papers, parenting, or creating a support network for Guilford County Parents, Colter likes to paint, cook, and plan events. She’s an especially big fan of celebrating people’s birthdays.

Partner Spotlight: Out of the Garden Project

Out of the Garden Project began as a family project to help solve food insecurity for six to ten families at Morehead Elementary School fourteen years ago. Now each month, more than 800 volunteers collect food, sort it in the warehouse, create packages for families, and deliver packages to schools and other locations.

Additionally, more than 3,000 families in the Piedmont-Triad are served each month through the organization’s Fresh Mobile Markets – free mobile food pantries that distribute about 65 pounds of fresh produce, bread, meat, and shelf-stable items to families in more than 25 locations in Guilford and neighboring counties. The markets are for families with children 0-18 years of age who must qualify to receive the food.

“It’s literally like a grocery store on wheels,” said Executive Director and President Don Milholin. “We want to help the whole person, the whole family. It’s a chance for people to have dignity in having food they can take home and gather around their table.”

In addition to the Fresh Mobile Markets and a 17,500-foot warehouse at The Church on 68, Out of the Garden has created a shared-use kitchen so food entrepreneurs can make low-risk packaged food to sell and an urban teaching farm. Originally located in downtown Greensboro, the farm has moved to McCleansville, where more crop acreage is available. A USDA grant for innovation will allow the organization to increase its harvest, which will be sold to create more funding for the organization and its projects.

Out of the Garden partners with Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) in several ways, but the most recent is participation in our Continuous Quality Improvement process.

“We’re excited about the CQI process and just getting started in the work,” said Beth Crise, director of development and operations, “We’re thinking about how we can put policies and procedures in place at the urban teaching farm to improve communication and become more and more successful. We can also streamline volunteer operations in our warehouse to rotate food in and out more efficiently to better serve families.”

“We believe we’re the most influential food partnership in the Piedmont and the largest non-governmental agency not affiliated directly with Feeding America in the area,” Milholin said. “Our mission isn’t just to give out food. Our mission is to provide stepping stones out of poverty.”

Out of the Garden will soon open a store at The Market Shoppes on Sandy Ridge Road to sell produce grown at the urban teaching farm. “We’re growing cabbage collards, raising chickens to sell eggs, and planting strawberries for next spring,” Milholin said. “We’re focused on creating a community where no one goes hungry.”

The Duke Endowment visits Ready Ready

The Duke Endowment Trustees, Ready for School, Ready for Life Board of Directors and staff gathered on August 29, 2022 for a site visit focused on the early childhood ecosystem. The Duke Endowment Trustees learned how children’s lives are affected by their different environments and how systems and organizations impact their development directly and indirectly, and what Ready Ready as a backbone organization is doing about it.

Panel discussions featured experts from organizations such as Family Connects, HealthySteps, Nurse-Family Partnership, Community Navigation, Guilford County Schools, Guilford County Government, Children’s Home Society, Bringing Out the Best, United Way of Greater Greensboro, shift_ed, Every Baby Guilford, Cone Health, N.C. General Assembly, N.C. A&T State University, the Foundation for a Healthy High Point, Duke University, and the Guilford County Health Department.

Please enjoy this photo gallery of the day’s events. Photo credit: Elizabeth Larson Photography

Partner Spotlight: Reading Connections

One in five people in Guilford County struggles with basic literacy skills. Reading Connections transforms our community by improving literacy and promoting educational equity for people of all ages.

“We’ve been in operation for more than 30 years and started as a way to provide extra literacy support for adults, but now it’s grown into much, much more,” said Alison Welch, Reading Connections family literacy manager. “We started the Family Literacy program in 2006 and work with parents, caregivers, and their children. We want to help parents know how they can support their children in becoming ready for kindergarten.”

Welch made the point that literacy is cyclical – which is why Reading Connections takes a multigenerational approach and partners with organizations like Ready for School, Ready for Life.

Reading Connections plans to enroll 150 families in its Guilford County program this year. In the 2020-21 academic year, 68 percent of the parents in the program reported reading more to their children, which is key to breaking the cycle of illiteracy.

“Research shows that children who start kindergarten behind their peers are less likely to experience success in school and read on grade level by third grade,” Welch said. “Working with Ready Ready and its program The Guilford Basics helps us explain to parents that early brain development is critical for future success in school.”

Reading Connections’ Family Literacy program provides six 15-week sessions during the school year at Title 1 elementary schools and community centers in Guilford County. Because parents are their children’s first teachers, the program incorporates literacy instruction for adults and children.

“A lot of the strategies included in The Basics Guilford are also included in the Motheread Fatheread curriculum we use in our program,” Welch said. “Encouraging parents to be actively engaged when reading with their kids, letting children turn the pages, repeating key phrases, or pointing at pictures are good examples. We had a Ready Ready staff member give a training in The Basics and Active Reading with our parents and loved how she emphasized that you don’t have to be reading the words on the page to engage your child in a story.”