Dear Ready Ready Supporters,
The White House has released a state-by-state analysis on the American Rescue Plan. In North Carolina, the child tax credit goes to more than two million children. According to the statement, the 2021 child tax credit meant most families in North Carolina received $3,600 for each child younger than six and $3,000 for each child ages 6-17 years old. Families received monthly payments from July through December 2021, when the pandemic stressed families to the limit and beyond.
A Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy study says child poverty rates have escalated since the monthly payments ended. The study found that in one month, from December 2021 to January 2022, the monthly child poverty rate increased 41 percent.
According to the study, 3.7 million more children lived below the poverty line in January 2022 than in December 2021.
In Guilford County, the child population is 116,240, and 32 percent are under age six, according to 2021 figures compiled by NC Child. Their data shows that 46.5 percent of children here are living in poor or low-income homes as of 2019 – and that’s before the pandemic hit.
We need public and private organizations to come together to invest in our children’s future. These investments must start with our youngest children, who need resources to achieve healthy development at a time when the brain grows most quickly. The earlier we invest in their futures, the better.
Every child deserves a great start in life, but not every child starts from the same place.
Thank you for supporting our mission at Ready Ready to achieve population-level change.
Sincerely,
Charrise Hart
Chief Executive Officer
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Build public will for early childhood priorities.
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- Ready Ready has submitted an American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) proposal to Guilford County to help our area’s most vulnerable children. The ARPA proposal seeks funding to expand Navigation services to pediatric offices and family medicine practices to serve more young children and their families. The proposal also supports Ready Ready’s Integrated Data System, which allows providers and staff to more efficiently handle referrals and information from nonprofit, government, and community agencies that provide resources to help with children’s early development.
- Ready Ready staff and founders shared updates about our Integrated Data System (IDS) and Early Childhood Workforce (ECW) to Guilford County General Assembly delegates at February's Chamber of Commerce event. These projects are part of Ready Ready’s system-building work to support families with young children. The General Assembly provided a directed grant to support Ready Ready’s work in this area in the 2022-23 state budget.
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Develop navigation system to connect families with effective services
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- The Community Alignment team secured $10,500 in funding for safe sleep materials in Guilford County. Navigators can connect families to this resource. Ready Ready has teamed with BackPack Beginnings to buy approximately 150 portable cribs and distribute them to the community. This is the only resource for safe sleep cribs open to any family in Guilford County.
- Children’s Home Society (CHS) has completed the first round of a time study for prenatal Navigation. The study followed eight Navigators for two weeks and found that it takes twice as long on average to complete the process including documentation with non-English speaking clients using an interpreter. Most Navigators work with two non-English speaking clients each week. Our organizations will use this information to create solutions to streamline the process.
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Expand and integrate proven programs to meet community need
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- A new onboarding process for HealthySteps Specialists in Cone Health practices has been streamlined. It will expedite start dates for newly hired Specialists.
- Family Connects nurses are offering both virtual and in-home visits in March. They will return to 100 percent in-home visits in April. The move comes as both nurses and families report “virtual visit fatigue” and a desire to connect in person. Data from 2021 showed that when abbreviated at-home visits occurred, connection rates increased to the highest point last year.
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Build a culture of continuous quality improvement (CQI)
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- In March 2022, Ready Ready, in partnership with the UNC School of Social Work, will deliver a virtual session to Cohort II programs introducing the CQI Infrastructure Assessment and Model for Improvement. The CQI Infrastructure Assessment will show programs how to build a shared understanding of existing infrastructure to guide program improvement action planning. The Model for Improvement, a CQI framework, will allow programs to develop their team's capacity. By applying the Model for Improvement framework, programs will be able to use family satisfaction and experience data to guide program improvement while also spreading and sustaining CQI tools in their programs/agencies
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Build technology to support data-informed decisions
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- We have developed a governance structure for the Integrated Data System (IDS) which will include an Executive Council to oversee this work. The Executive Council will be responsible for setting direction for the IDS, approving membership for the Governance Council, and making final decisions about the IDS systems and program. We anticipate
- Ready Ready has built a Proof of Concept demonstration for the IDS to illustrate how service providers and family members will be able to communicate and streamline the ability to receive Navigation services. The demos are being shared with community stakeholders to gather feedback for the system.
- Navigation is preparing for the next major system release in early April that will help program partners track family needs and resources shared with families. This will allow service providers to close the loop on individual referrals and address service gaps at the community level more quickly.
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Conduct rigorous evaluation process and build sustainability for system-building work
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- MDRC is on track to write an evaluation plan for Ready Ready’s system-building work. MDRC’s workflow includes producing a logic model that will help specific activities and outputs for measurement for these areas: Prenatal Navigation, Continuous Quality Improvement, Integrated Data System, and evidence-based programs integration and implementation. This evaluation plan is scheduled for delivery to The Duke Endowment in June.
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Ages 3-5
Ready Ready has released a Request for Proposals, seeking local partners to lead the initial implementation of community-wide strategies designed to improve outcomes for children ages three to give in Guilford County. Three strategies will serve as the initial pilots for Guilford County beginning this year.
- To increase alignment between early care and education programs and the school system, implement coordination activities, including offering joint professional development between child care center staff and kindergarten teachers and offering transition supports to families (e.g., coaching, virtual school tours, etc.).
- To improve children’s early literacy skills, implement a county-wide active reading effort. We anticipate selecting evidence-based interventions to implement across settings (public libraries, home-based care, child care centers, etc.) that will encourage adults to read frequently with children, focusing on families reading with children more at home.
- To improve adults’ and children’s social-emotional development, implement and expand evidence-based interventions targeting children ages 3-5. We anticipate training adults serving children in various settings, like educational and medical settings, so that they are better equipped to build children’s skills and competencies.
You can learn more by viewing the RFP Webinar which provides an overview of Ready Ready’s current and proposed work. Additionally, you can learn more about the three strategies selected for initial implementation by viewing a strategy-specific webinar linked below.
RFP Webinar: Early Care & Education/Kindergarten Transition & Alignment
RFP Webinar: Active Reading
RFP Webinar: Social-Emotional Development
The intent to apply form can be found here and is due by the end of the day on Monday, March 28th. Final responses are due by the end of the day on April 14, 2022.
Ready Ready convened an Early Childhood Education Leadership Council to help increase the quality and quantity of early care and education programs. An initial meeting included Guilford County Partnership for Children, Guilford Child Development, and Guilford County Schools. This group will identify other stakeholders to engage in the council and establish measurable goals.
The Basics Guilford
At the end of 2021, 23 partners implemented the Basics Guilford with the families they serve. Since January, Center for New North Carolinians, Gateway, Piedmont Pediatrics, Reading Connections, Wake Forest Pediatrics, and YWCA Greensboro have become partners sharing the Basics with clients and parents in multiple ways.
Twenty-five employers have agreed to share Basics information and materials with employees who take maternity/paternity leave. If you have a contact with a local employer you think could benefit from these materials and information, please contact Megan LeFaivre at meganl@getreadyguilford.org.
Family Voice
Ready Ready staff members, including our new Parent Liaison team members, are identifying opportunities to engage family voices on our board, committees, and all planning/design teams. Engaging family voice is a key focus of our family engagement work.
Our Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI) facilitators plan a Phase 2 training for our second cohort of COFI graduates. The training will take place beginning in June. Following the six-session training, graduates will lead a community outreach process to understand more about the needs of families in Guilford County. The goal of the outreach process is to identify areas of focus for community projects that can improve the well-being of children and families in Guilford County.
Early childhood workforce
Ready Ready is partnering with EQuIPD and N.C. A&T State University to collaborate on an early childhood pilot project to support best practices, business model, and increased wages for early childhood educators.
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Meet our new Ready Ready team members
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Connie Colter joined the Ready Ready team on March 1 as a Parent Liaison. Since moving to North Carolina four years ago, Connie Colter has served her community in many ways, including serving as a board member for YWCA Healthy Moms Healthy Babies. Learn more about Connie on our website.
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Before joining Ready Ready staff as a Parent Liaison on March 1, Sanaa Sharrieff volunteered as a parent leader with the Guilford Parent Leader Network, served on the Guilford PLN Steering Committee, the All-PLN Steering Committee, and made contributions to the Ages 3-5 Design Group. Learn more about Sanaa on our website.
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NAEYC released its new early childhood educator field survey brief. The survey includes data gathered from brief check-ins with nearly 5,000 early childhood educators working across all states and settings.
In partnership with the National Black Child Development Institute, Sesame Street in Communities presented this webinar to share its racial justice resources.
North Carolina is researching how to remedy the model for child care subsidies, according to this story in EdNC. NC Department of Health and Human Services will hire an outside consultant to research new ways to structure the child care subsidy program.
The North Carolina Early Childhood Foundation (NCECF) has launched a listening tour across North Carolina to learn more about early care and education programs. The Care and Learning (CANDL) tour will gather focus groups in cities across the state through the end of September 2022.
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Since the North Carolina Child Care Stabilization Grant was first introduced in October 2021, nearly $336 million of the total $805 million has been distributed to almost 4,000 child care centers across the state. Read more from Governor Roy Cooper’s office.
In February, Gov. Cooper created a governance board for the North Carolina Longitudinal Data System (NCLDS) during his education cabinet meeting. The NCLDS is a system of systems that connects data across agencies to track student outcomes. Learn more in the executive order. A roadmap published in 2020 is also available.
EdNC offers an opinion piece from Ferrell Guillory, a journalism professor at UNC-Chapel Hill, about how divisive politics has resulted in divergent education agendas.
WRAL-TV has aired an editorial calling on the N.C. General Assembly to implement the Leandro plan.
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