PARTNERSHIP FOR CHILDREN AND YOUTH
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Mission Statement
The Partnership for Children & Youth (PCY) is the leading organization in California advocating and building capacity for high-quality expanded learning opportunities and community-school partnerships serving students from under-resourced communities. Our mission is to bridge policy, practice, and people to support healthy development and school success for youth. Some of the major milestones in this work include: * spearheading legislation and providing technical assistance that has expanded access to high-quality summer learning programs for more than 25,000 students; * leading the statewide campaign to ensure that California's public afterschool programs are adequately and sustainably funded for the needs of the nearly 500,000 students they support; * co-authoring California’s first-ever statewide quality standards for expanded learning programs; and * launching our innovative HousED program, the first major initiative in the country focused on the expanded learning in affordable and public housing
About This Cause
The Partnership for Children and Youth (PCY) was founded in 1998 as a project of the United Way of the Bay Area, bringing together partners in philanthropy, public systems, nonprofit youth service, policy and advocacy, and the business community to address inequities in opportunity for the Bay Area’s and California’s low-income children and youth and children and youth of color. PCY incorporated as an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization in 2002. Since then our primary focus since has been on the public systems and private-sector collaborators that enhance the effectiveness of the school day for underserved students: after school and summer learning, community-school partnerships for physical and mental health, and collaborations with housing, family support, and other sectors. Our highest priority, held consistently for 15 years, is to improve the systems serving children and youth in the 80% of their time that they spend outside the core school day, recognizing that disparities in resources, access, and quality in these systems correlate with disparities in academic success, health and wellness, and adult economic self-sufficiency. In our plans for 2017 and beyond, a central focus for PCY is on replicating and scaling, both within our own initiatives and through partnerships with other organizations, innovations that have improved program quality for after school and summer learning programs in housing, built new capacity for coordinated social-emotional learning approaches that span the school day and after school, and helped districts prioritize and build quality in summer learning programs. At the same time, we will continue our work at a broader systems level to develop research and data supporting the value of after school programs and community-school partnerships as key strategies to close the academic opportunity and achievement gap, to promote broad adoption of policies and financing approaches that connect students at the school site with the full range of health and social supports they need to succeed socially and academically, and to advocate for stable and sustainable state and federal funding streams (particularly ASES and 21st Century Community Learning Centers) supporting expanded learning programs as a key element of public commitment to closing the opportunity and achievement gap for underserved students. A key element of our work in 2017 and beyond is our innovative HousED program, which supports after school and summer learning programs in affordable and public housing developments. In 2017, major areas of focus will be to sustain the local technical assistance and quality improvement work we have developed within the Bay Area, using its success as a means to promote broader engagement by housing providers in a high-quality, intentional approach to youth programming; and to support dissemination of the quality standards, assessment tools, and approaches to provider professional network development that our local work has created, with an eye to supporting similar capacity-building work beyond our own direct service “footprint.” Specific targeted results during the 2017-18 program year include: * Provide training and coaching to on-site youth programs in at least 10 Bay Area housing agencies representing more than 100 program sites and reaching 10,000 or more children and youth. * Produce a quality assessment tool adopted by all participating housing agencies. The assessment tool will align with the Quality Standards for Expanded Learning Programs in Affordable Housing developed by the Network in 2015-16. * Use of the assessment tool and follow-up self-survey approaches will demonstrate gains in staff capacity (knowledge gains and skills gains), program quality, and youth experience (satisfaction levels, measures of engagement, leadership opportunities, skills gains) among participating housing programs. We will also continue in our role as host and lead facilitator for the California Community Schools Network, using this platform to promote broader adoption of sustainable approaches to financing robust community-school partnerships and connecting children and youth to health and nutrition entitlements that are critical to both the academic success and the overall wellbeing of low-income students. Specific targeted results include: * Provide outreach, information, and technical assistance placing 14-16 school districts across California on a path toward direct certification of students for free and reduced price school meals. * At least 3 County Offices of Education each in Northern and Southern California will be identified and engaged as partners and co-conveners to reach districts with information and technical assistance regarding SMAA billing and strategies for connecting students to Medi-Cal and health entitlements. * Produce a toolkit outlining staffing structures, allowable activities and technical information regarding SMAA billing in partnership with our technical assistance and statewide advocate partners, as well as feedback from COEs and districts around appropriate messaging and target audience needs. Our Expanded Learning 360/365 program works to increase alignment between school-day and out-of-school strategies to support social-emotional learning (SEL), while emphasizing the particular value of after school and summer programs to advance SEL goals for students from low-income families. EL 360/365 will work with a Professional Learning Community (PLC) of 10 school districts across California to develop and disseminate these strategies and practices to the broader audience of California school districts and education policy leaders. Targeted results of the work include: * All participating districts will implement new site-level strategies designed to increase consistency of student SEL experience from the school day to the expanded learning program. * PCY will collaborate with the American Institutes for Research (AIR) to produce a qualitative analysis of the PLC and develop a communications strategy for disseminating results and advocating for replication of promising practices. PCY understands itself as a learning organization, and has positioned continuous learning as a core value in our most recent 5-year plan. This commitment to learning takes a number of forms -- building relationships with field experts as a source of new and better practices, partnering with researchers, etc. -- but a key component is the role of independent evaluation across all of our initiatives and at the organization-wide level. All of our projects and initiatives are designed from the outset to incorporate evaluation data and periodically adjust practice based on independent evaluators’ findings. Given our intermediary role in replicating and scaling effective practice, and in advocating for policy to support this goal, we have also committed ourselves to publishing and communicating evaluation data as part of our core operations. At the organization-wide level we measure impact in a variety of ways, including successful policy change, numbers of individuals and organizations taking action in advocacy campaigns, numbers of districts or schools implementing improved practice based on our intervention (e.g., districts newly implementing summer learning programs, schools and districts establishing multi-disciplinary family engagement teams, districts creating frameworks to align school-day and after school SEL goals and strategies, etc.), and ultimately numbers of students and families receiving new benefits or demonstrating improved outcomes (e.g., increase in levels of school meal participation or Medi-Cal enrollment, decreases in truancy rates, improvement in grade-level reading, decreased incidence of behavior problems, etc.). We have witnessed significant gains in all of the abovementioned metrics over the course of our work in the past five years. All of our initiatives are grounded in partnership and collaboration, maximizing leverage of resources and "buy-in" while increasing potential for sustainability. A partial list of key organization-wide and initiative partners includes: * Organization-wide:CA Department of Education Expanded Learning Division, California Afterschool Advocacy Alliance, National Afterschool Association, Every Hour Counts * HousED -- Attendance Works, Hysten Consulting, Public Profit, MidPen Housing, Eden Housing, Mercy Housing, Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (CLPHA), Annie E. Casey Foundation * Community Schools -- Food Research and Action Center, California School-Based Health Alliance, California Food Policy Advocates * Summer Matters -- Converge for Impact, ASAPconnect, FowlerHoffman, National Summer Learning Association, David & Lucile Packard Foundation * Expanded Learning 360/365 -- American Institutes for Research, John W. Gardner Center for Youth and their Communities, California Office to Reform Education, 10 districts in the project’s PLC (Fresno, Garden Grove, Los Angeles, Oakland, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Leandro, San Rafael, Santa Ana, Visalia) As indicated in this overview of some of our major partnerships, a core value and continuous source of innovation for PCY lies in the emphasis on bringing together institutions, systems, disciplines, and communities to work in common for the benefit of young people. This commitment to valuing multiple kinds of expertise and diverse backgrounds is reflected in the commitment to diverse and equitable staff recruitment, retention, and leadership opportunities within PCY, and in an organizational decision-making structure which works intentionally and conscientiously to equally value input from experts in research, policy, direct youth service, finance, and organizational development.