Uncategorized Archives - Ready for School, Ready for Life

Partner Spotlight: Child First

Child First helps families build strong, nurturing relationships that heal and protect young children from the devastating impact of trauma and chronic stress. The program uses a two-generation approach, providing mental health services to parents and children through home visits and connecting them with resources, information, and support to make healthy child development possible.

“We use a team approach to help caregivers and their children ages 0-5. The caregiver isn’t always a biological parent, and sometimes it’s multiple caregivers,” said Anita Faulkner, LCMHCS and Family Solutions owner. “In many cases, there are kinship care placements. Many of the children we serve have parents who are incarcerated or may not be available due to substance abuse or other factors, and they have many different housing situations.”

Family Solutions is one of two host agencies in Guilford County for Child First. The other is Family Service of the Piedmont. Each agency has four teams of clinicians and a supervisor, so there are 18 new staff members focused on this issue, according to Faulkner. “Our teams have trained together since we began the program in June 2022. I think it’s an excellent example of community collaboration and how Ready for School, Ready for Life is bringing local organizations together to meet these gaps in services,” Faulkner said.

Science clearly shows that the early childhood years lay the foundation for later economic productivity, responsible citizenship, sound mental health, cognitive development, and physical health. According to the Child First website, high-risk environments of extreme poverty, maternal depression, domestic violence, substance abuse, homelessness, and other factors lead to toxic levels of stress that are harmful to young brains.

Because Child First focuses on two generations, the program begins with a series of assessments for the child and caregiver. “We help them understand their own trauma histories and their own stressors. It gives them insight into what they have been through and helps us set strategies to address behavior issues and deepen the relationships between a child and caregiver,” Faulkner said.

The program has two aims: to decrease the stress the family experiences by connecting them to the resources, support, and information they need and to provide parent-child psychotherapy to repair the impact of trauma on the child and strengthen the caregiving relationship.

“Because we are a home-visiting program, we realize it’s something big to let someone into your home and open up about issues your family faces,” Faulkner said. “We are helping families get to a place where they can make a positive change. Our resource partners help us with housing, furniture, food, clothing, and child care, for example. The resources are always changing, and we work together to ensure families have what they need.”

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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.”

Staff Profile: Heather Adams

“I’ve always had a passion for working with children. From very early in my work with children, I understood that a strong foundation sets them up for success,” VP of Public Will-Building Heather Adams said. “After my daughter was born, I shifted my drive away from the classroom and into early childhood development.”

After nearly 15 years as Executive Director of the Rockingham County Partnership for Children, Adams joined Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) as Director of Engagement and Literacy Initiatives. Her projects included areas such as family engagement with the Guilford Parent Leader Network, strategic planning for The Basics Guilford, and leading a community-wide design team for the Ages 3-5 stage of our work. She celebrated her second anniversary at Ready Ready just last month.

“Now my role is building momentum across Guilford County for the work Ready Ready is coordinating,” Adams said. “Our goal is population-level change, and it impacts the whole community. That means we must reach out to our incredibly diverse community and help them understand why we’re building a system of care for the very youngest children and their families.”

Ready Ready’s work focused on prenatal to age three is scaling up to full implementation. In addition, the next stage adds strategies focused on children ages 3-5 and then 5-8. “Our hope in stage two is that we’ll see a reduction in disparities, improved outcomes for children at kindergarten entry, and success in school by third grade. As we build public will and momentum, I think we’ll be a much more visible organization in the community.”

A recent empty-nester with her daughter in her second year of college, Adams enjoys making connections with the community. One key activity – running. A former marathon runner, Adams finds running to be both a work-life balance release and an effective fitness routine. “I have found a lot of community running the streets and trails of Greensboro and Guilford County. When you’re pounding the pavement with friends, there’s lots to discuss while you enjoy the scenery.”

Ready for School, Ready for Life Awards Continuous Quality Improvement Grants

The grants help organizations improve to better serve Guilford County families.

(Greensboro, N.C., August 25, 2022) – Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) has awarded $652,000 in grants to programs from 13 organizations serving families in Guilford County to participate in its second cohort of the Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) process. Ready Ready has partnered with The Duke Endowment and the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work on these grants to make participating in the CQI Cohort II financially possible.

“CQI is a team-based process of collecting, analyzing, and using data to improve service quality. This data helps identify efficiency, effectiveness, performance, and outcomes to provide the resources our community needs,” said Ready Ready CEO Charrise Hart. “We are glad to have such a good response from community partners who want to be involved in Ready Ready’s system-building work.”

To date, Ready Ready has had 13 programs complete CQI training. Four more are currently participating in a cohort process. CQI Cohort II launches in September 2022 and will wrap up in March 2023. The CQI Cohort II programs are:

Backpack Beginnings
The Barnabas Network
The Center for New North Carolinians
Children and Families First (formerly Guilford Child Development)
Greensboro Housing Authority
GuilfordWorks
The Kellin Foundation
Out of the Garden Project
Positive Direction for Youth and Families
Room at the Inn
Triad Goodwill
Women’s Resource Center of Greensboro
YWCA Greensboro

Each program will dedicate 3-4 team members who will participate in monthly learning sessions with other programs and CQI facilitators from the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work. Between sessions, team members will complete assignments and receive coaching from their facilitators.

“Through this work, programs will build their capacity to apply a CQI framework,” said Jacqueline McCracken, Ready Ready’s vice president for strategic impact. “This work is focused on the Model for Improvement, a powerful and flexible method that promotes a structured process for experiential learning.”

Through the CQI process, the programs will build the capacity to use program data to identify challenges or opportunities for improvement related to family experience or satisfaction. Through experiential learning, programs will gain the tools they need to generate higher performance-building capacity while serving Guilford County families and children.

“Every child deserves a great start in life, but not every child starts from the same place,” Hart said. “By using this process, the organizations in CQI Cohort II will be able to enhance the important work they are doing to assist Guilford County families with the resources, support, and information they need to give their youngest children a strong foundation for success in school and life.”

Media contact: Stephanie Skordas, Director of Marketing & Communications, stephanies@getreadyguilford.org or 336.579.2977 ext. 2015

Town Hall meeting explores community needs

By Stephanie Skordas, Director of Marketing and Communications

Parent leaders held a Town Hall meeting on April 24 to ask families how our community could offer more support. The Town Hall was facilitated by Guilford Parent Leader Network members who have graduated from Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI) Phase II training. They began the process with a survey that ran from December 2021 through March 2022, asking members of the community about their needs as parents.

“The Town Hall meeting was amazing,” said Katina Allen, one of the facilitators. “We heard people voice their opinions, got some great points across, and received great feedback.”

During the virtual Town Hall, the 20 participants met together via Zoom and discussed the survey results. “After talking about the community findings, they decided to focus on affordable housing, affordable child care, and living wages and benefits,” said Yuri Alston, family engagement coordinator at Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready). “Breakout rooms on each topic allowed the attendees to talk about their experiences, brainstorm solutions, and determine next steps.”

One item that grabbed a lot of interest was affordable child care, especially exploring the idea of a pop-up child care center for working parents in a community. “I have an eight-month-old and a middle schooler, and finding high-quality child care that working parents can afford for infant care and after-school care is challenging,” Allen said. “If we had a location for children in our community for teacher workdays or snow days, that would allow parents who have to be at work to know their children are in a safe place.”

By the end of the event, the group decided to explore each topic more completely for the next month and report back on the findings, such as regulations around child care, advocacy for living wages, and ways to connect around affordable housing.

Partner Spotlight: Kellen Foundation

By Stephanie Skordas, Director of Marketing and Communications

The mission of the Kellin Foundation is to strengthen resilience for children, families, adults, and communities through trauma-informed behavioral health services focused on prevention, treatment, and healing.

“We prevent, treat, and heal,” said Dr. Kelly Graves, Kellin Foundation’s executive director, and co-founder. “We do this primarily two ways – one is behavioral health services including mental health and substance abuse, and the second strategy is community and systems transformation.”

Focused on advocacy and outreach, clinical and peer support services, and building resilient communities, the organization serves about 10,000 people a year. The Kellin Foundation is one of only two nationally recognized community behavioral health centers in North Carolina with expertise and focus on trauma and resiliency as a partner with the National Child Traumatic Stress Network. Duke University is the other center.

“Using that trauma-informed lens is critical because our behavioral health, our physical health, and our health, in general, is strongly connected to stress and adversity,” Graves said. “It’s understanding and realizing the impact that trauma has, recognizing the signs and symptoms of stress has on our bodies and integrating what we know about these impacts into our practices, policies, and treatment.”

The organization created the Child Response Initiative (CRI), which helps children impacted by violence and stress and their families. CRI has four objectives: early intervention, information and education, community connection and referral, and building relationships. It provides community-based coordinated services delivered within a trauma-informed framework, leveraging the Guilford County Trauma Provider Network, a group of about 30 partners and organizations that work together to support safety and wellness among children and families.

Graves explained that traumatic stress can be experienced through an adverse childhood experience and systemic issues like discrimination and racism. She says the COVID-19 pandemic has created a broad awakening that stress impacts every aspect of our life, including mental health.

“The pandemic has opened the door to deeper conversation around how stress impacts us and the importance of monitoring and addressing that stress,” Graves said.

In addition to her work at the Kellin Foundation, Graves has been involved in Ready for School, Ready for Life’s system-building work, serving on various focus groups, workgroups, and committees throughout the years. She recently participated in the ages 3-5 social-emotional development workgroup for Phase II of Ready Ready’s work.

“What I’m excited to see in Ready Ready and in groups across the community is the emphasis given to the importance of social-emotional development and mental health as critical to helping children get ready for kindergarten, as well as the importance of taking a multi-generational approach to the work,” Graves said.

Graves and her team at the Kellin Foundation believe that behavioral health is strongly connected to adversity and trauma; everyone deserves to live in a home and in a community that is safe and free of trauma; that people, families, and communities are resilient and can thrive despite adversity; and that community organizations and systems play a key role in addressing adversity and building resiliency using a trauma-informed framework.

We work with more than 100 community organizations. You can see the extensive list on our website. If you’re one of our partners and would like to be featured, please contact Stephanie Skordas, Director of Marketing & Communications.

Staff profile: Megan LeFaivre

By Stephanie Skordas, Director of Marketing and Communications

When the idea that became Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) was just starting to spark in Guilford County, Literacy Coordinator Megan LeFaivre was there.

“I served as a volunteer on the very first steering committee, through the Early Literacy Design Team, and the 100-day challenge,” LeFaivre said. “At the time, I was the community vice president of the Junior League, and it made sense to join the committee. Then I just fell in love with the work and kept showing up.”

LeFaivre spent many years volunteering on Ready Ready committees and participating in workgroups. “When the Literacy Coordinator position became available in 2021, I knew it would be my dream job.” As Literacy Coordinator, she uses her background as a kindergarten through fifth-grade reading specialist to encourage parents and caregivers in the community to use The Basics Guilford.

“As a teacher, I saw how hard children needed to fight to catch up if they came to kindergarten unprepared,” LeFaivre said. “Using this social moment to change that problem is crucial to our community’s success.”

LeFaivre has trained hundreds of interested people and organizations in the Basics, five powerful science-based concepts anyone can use to foster children’s healthy development – starting with infants.

“When we consider that 80 percent of a child’s brain develops before age three, it’s important to have these intentional conversations with children,” LeFaivre said. “It’s not just the child in your house. It’s the children you interact with daily in your neighborhood, a co-worker’s child, or another family member. In any conversation you have with a child you can do these five easy, basic things to help their brains develop.”

When she’s not teaching the Basics, distributing books through community partners, or helping to establish Basics-themed areas for parents in the community, you’re likely to find a book in LeFaivre’s hands or headphones. “I’m especially interested in historical fiction, mainly World War I and II-era stories.”

LeFaivre also enjoys cooking — all kinds of dishes. “That’s partly because the person who cooks doesn’t have to clean in my house,” she admits. “And that works in my favor.”

11 Parent Leaders graduate from COFI Phase 2 training

By Stephanie Skordas, Director of Marketing & Communications

Eleven parent leaders have graduated from Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI) Phase 2 training. The COFI model makes positive changes in parents’ lives by using their strengths and commitment to their children and their neighborhoods. These Guilford Parent Leader Network (GPLN) members first engaged with the program through COFI Phase 1 last fall.

The COFI model focuses on self, family, community, and policy and systems in the various training levels. Phase 1 focuses on creating supportive parent teams, setting goals, and establishing plans. In Phase 2, the training focuses on creating community-based agendas that start with common concerns parents raise.

“COFI presents a platform for parent leaders to fulfill their desired roles in their respective communities,” said Harrison Spencer, a GPLN member who recently graduated from the COFI Phase 2 training. “In addition, COFI offers key training, resources, services, and compensation for participants and members that may be otherwise overlooked or not offered by other organizations. COFI encourages parents to become involved, engaged, and active leaders.”

COFI uses a “train the trainers” approach to delivering its model to communities like Guilford County. In April, three parent leaders were trained on the Phase 2 model and led the five training sessions for the 11 new graduates over the summer.

“As a recent social work graduate, one of the primary issues I had with the structure was the top-down and lack of autonomy that were/are rampant in our practice, support, and approaches,” Spencer said. “This is where COFI is unique in its approach and geared towards revealing some insight or new perspectives to others.”

According to its website, the COFI way has trained more than 4,724 parents in 44 communities like Guilford County. “About 50 percent of Phase 1 participants go on to Phase 2 within about six months, according to COFI,” said Heather Adams, Ready Ready’s Director of Engagement and Literacy Initiatives. “In November, we had 15 parent leaders graduate from COFI Phase 1, so 93 percent of our graduates have now gone through Phase 2. These parents will be the change they want to see in their communities.”

Adams says additional COFI Phase 1 sessions are in the works. Families with children involved in Early Head Start and Head Start through Guilford Child Development will be trained this fall. Plans are underway for families with children at Falkener Elementary to be the next cohort, and a High Point-focused series will be held in spring 2022. “This training creates a powerful space for connection,” she said.

Spencer says he would recommend COFI to other parents and caregivers in Guilford County. “COFI not only creates a platform for others but a possibility for additional support and friends that could be considered family and commonalities from the group and organizational bonding.

For more information about the Guilford Parent Leader Network, please contact Heather Adams, Director of Engagement and Literacy Initiatives. Meetings are held on the third Monday of the month from 7-8:30 p.m. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, these meetings are being held via Zoom.

Partner Spotlight: YWCA High Point

By Stephanie Skordas, Director of Marketing & Communications

One hundred and one years ago, the YWCA High Point was formed. The organization is dedicated to eliminating racism, empowering women, and promoting peace, justice, freedom, and dignity for all.

Today, the YWCA has seven core areas of programming: social justice and advocacy, women’s resource center, youth services, aquatics and wellness, teaching kitchen, Latino family center, and adolescent parenting.

Executive Director Heidi Majors has been with YWCA High Point almost 20 years, and said a big part of the focus is maternal health and ensuring that infants and toddlers in the greater High Point area are meeting the milestones and being prepared for school at age five.

“Our maternal health programs are so important,” Majors said. “In June 2020, YWCA began using the Parents As Teachers model, with case managers to work with the parents. YWCA High Point is expanding to have 5 Parent Educators to serve more parents. One of these case managers works with adolescent parents under the age of 19. Through home visits and group education sessions, we focus on planning for their families, as well as making sure they have prenatal care to help with healthy birth outcomes.”

The Adolescent Parenting Program works to make a difference in the lives of young school-age mothers and fathers who are pregnant or parenting. In addition to home visits and group education, the program offers mentors, school support sessions, college tours, and field trips.

Majors said Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) supported many of the YWCA’s adolescent parents during the pandemic. “That was an instrumental piece of how we lift up our high-risk communities and make sure they had what they needed. Whether that was food, diapers, or other essential items, we were able to do that thanks to Ready Ready and The Duke Endowment.”

YWCA High Point also supports families with infants and toddlers through Healthy Beginnings. It’s a personalized program for minority women and their children. Healthy Beginnings seeks to help young women have healthy pregnancies and healthy children and continue a healthy lifestyle between pregnancies.

Last year YWCA High Point served more than 1,000 parents with its Baby Basics closet – providing diapers, formula, clothing, and larger items like cribs and pack-n-play equipment. “We work very closely with agencies across Guilford County and the North Carolina Diaper Bank to ensure our infants and toddlers have this support. A parent won’t have to keep their child home from daycare because they don’t have diapers, for example, and they can go to work. It’s about lifting up the whole support system.”

Majors said the YWCA’s focus on social justice is designed to bring real change to the fight for gender equality and racial justice. In the time since the murder of George Floyd last summer, Majors is encouraged to see the conversation continue about systemic racism, racial equity, and social justice.

“In 2020, there has been an opportunity for people to be open, listen, and learn to educate themselves. Not everyone is receptive to that message, but through collaborations and partnerships, we’re looking at more systemic change,” Majors said. “Our Community Builders program, which we started in 2018, has trained individuals using the groundwater approach from the Racial Equity Institute. We’re fighting for racial equity because there are so many disparities within our communities. We’re addressing these disparities through a number of programs, but there’s still a lot of work to do.”

To learn more about YWCA High Point, visit their website.