The 'secret' to success for children growing up in poverty has been in plain sight for years, operating in more-affluent communities: supporting children from the womb through college, doing whatever it takes to overcome any barrier to a child's successful development.
-Harlem Children's Zone
Fifty years ago a high school diploma allowed a young person to have a good job, earn a steady income, and provide for his or her family. That is no longer true. A post-secondary education is now necessary to be a productive, successful and happy member of society. In short, the high school diploma is no longer a ticket to the ‘American Dream’.
The economic costs of under-educating our children are staggering and have become a massive burden on our community.
Whatever It Takes seeks to ensure that every child in Athens-Clarke County will graduate from a post-secondary education. We, along with our partners, will accomplish this through emphasizing early intervention, recognizing that parents are a child’s first and most important teachers, focusing resources in a limited geographic area, identifying and training neighborhood leaders, setting high expectations for all children, creating a culture of success, and using data to direct to policy.
Today, graduating from high school is simply not enough. The marketplace has changed such that using high school graduation as the final educational benchmark is clearly inadequate. High school graduation must be followed by another quality educational experience to ensure each child’s ability to successfully compete in a global economy.
Education is the silver bullet. An educated citizenry creates a community with better jobs, safer neighborhoods, and happier families. Producing well-educated children decreases the need for less effective and more costly government interventions. Conversely, having a large segment of our children attempt to go into the workforce with minimal skills creates social and economic instability along with a massive financial burden on our community.
Children respond to the environment and expectations created for them. We must create a culture of high expectations while also ensuring that each child has everything he or she needs to meet and exceed those expectations. In addition to more basic needs such as eyeglasses or transportation, every child needs a loving, caring adult to encourage him or her to explore the world, learn everyday, treat others with respect, and to give back to the community.
By emphasizing early intervention, focusing existing services in a limited geographic area, creating a culture of success, and using data to direct policy we can ensure that every child is equipped to graduate from a post-secondary education, be it vocational training, military service, technical school, junior college, or a 4-year university.
In an effort to replicate the success of the Harlem Children’s Zone in other areas of the country, the United States Department of Education launched the Promise Neighborhoods Initiative in 2010. Three hundred and thirty nine organizations from across the United States submitted applications for planning grants to support the development of a ‘cradle to career’ continuum of solutions for the success of all children. In September 2010 the Whatever It Takes initiative was one of twenty one organizations awarded a Promise Neighborhoods planning grant and work began immediately to bring the entire Athens community together to craft what would come to be known as the Athens Community Plan for Children.
When Ben Franklin said, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” he could not have coined a better phrase for conveying the value of quality early care and learning. The quality of the learning environment and the care the child is given early in life weigh heavily in the child’s eventual academic and life success.
Children who are exposed to a culture of learning at an early age have a far greater chance of success in life and less need for expensive and less effective intervention(s) later in life. Almost every child has a parent that wants him or her to succeed, but not every parent knows how to teach their child the skills they need to be successful. We must make sure that every child is taught the skill set needed to be successful in life.
Athens has one of the best early learning programs in the country, but it serves only a fraction of those who need it. The long term costs to our community of not meeting these children’s needs is staggering.
While there are many social service organizations that perform exceptional work by helping a number of children to beat the odds, previous efforts have failed to change the overall trajectory of at-risk children. This occurs because services have been spread too thin over a large geographic area.
By concentrating our efforts in a single neighborhood and subsequently expanding outward Whatever It Takes will achieve a domino effect bringing this ‘cradle to career’ continuum to the entirety of Athens-Clarke County. We have started with a manageable area that will allow us to reach the tipping point of 65% neighborhood involvement that is necessary to create a genuine culture of success. This concentration of resources creates a compounding effect, changing the odds for all children rather than helping just a few to beat the odds.
Rather than making decisions based on emotion, intuition, or politics we will use a state of the art longitudinal data system developed specifically to meet the needs of Athens-Clarke County to monitor the progress of our programs while respecting the privacy of the families in the neighborhood – allocating funds and resources to those that are proven to be working and recalibrating our efforts in the areas that are not. Simply put, Whatever It Takes will not support any program or policy that cannot prove its capacity to help children succeed.
Family Connection-Communities in Schools of Athens, the parent organization of Whatever It Takes, has been quietly leading many successful initiatives in Athens-Clarke County for over twenty years. The dramatic decrease in teen pregnancy, the successful reduction of child abuse and neglect, the formation of the Classic City High School Performance Learning Center, and many other projects have all come out of Family Connection-Communities in Schools of Athens.
Family Connection-Communities in Schools of Athens by its very nature, is a partnership of non-profits, businesses, the public sector, and most importantly – families.
When the public and private sectors come together great things can be accomplished!
The initial focus of the Whatever It Takes Initiative is to create community-wide consensus around our new expectations for children. We are creating a system which better connects children and families to existing proven-to-be effective services. Children in the Whatever It Takes’ neighborhoods are expected to succeed in school and to give back to their community.
We are encouraging new independent projects, such as expanded Internet access, mentoring programs, and new quality early learning programs to focus in our initial neighborhood and are making sure that existing services become available to every child in the neighborhood. In time, through classic fundraising and grant writing we will continue to scale up existing programs that work but don’t currently reach everyone in Athens-Clarke County.
A crucial part of the Whatever It Takes initiative is our Neighborhood Leadership program. By identifying natural leaders within the neighborhood and providing them with the education and training needed to develop their natural talents, Whatever It Takes is building a sustainable network of on-the-ground experts to guide the process and implement solutions for childhood success.
The first group of Neighborhood Leaders were identified and recruited in December 2010 and spent 2011 training, participating in WIT Strategic Action Teams to inform and guide the planning work of the initiative, hosting intimate ‘Living Room Conversation’ focus groups in their homes, organizing monthly ‘Community Conversation’ events to seek public involvement in the process, planning and carrying out a door-to-door Community Assessment Survey and much more. As if all of that weren’t impressive enough, the majority of WIT Neighborhood Leaders also began pursuing post-secondary educations themselves in order to be better teachers and examples for their own children.
This is how real change happens. On the ground. In the Neighborhood. Door-to-door. Face-to-face. Person-to-person.
Whatever It Takes is all about the power of collaboration. By bringing together Neighborhood Leaders, families, educators, health care professionals, academics, members of the creative community and other experts, Whatever It Takes has formed Strategic Action Teams to develop and implement solutions for the success of all children in Athens-Clarke County.
During this last year Strategic Action Teams made up of approximately five hundred people from the community and over seventy institutional partners have worked tens of thousands of hours to put together a plan that creates a seamless longitudinal network of support for kids from preconception to post-secondary graduation. This work has developed into seventy seven evidence based solutions addressing the needs and leveraging the strengths unique to our community. Frankly we’re incredibly proud that our town has produced such an amazing plan.
Taken together these solutions represent one of the most strategic and aggressive efforts ever undertaken to ensure the success of every child in a community.
We will, at every opportunity, advance the basic principles of Whatever It Takes: early intervention, recognizing parents as a child’s first and most important teachers, identifying and training neighborhood leaders, focusing existing resources in a limited geographic area to create a compounding effect, creating a culture of success, using data driven policy, and establishing high expectations for children while providing the support needed to meet and exceed those expectations.
Children in quality early learning programs earn $20,000 more per year as adults and save the state $19,000 per year in remediation and criminal justice costs.(Reynolds 2004)
By 3rd grade middle class children know 12,000 words, children from low income families know 4,000.(Klein & Knitzer, 2007)
The odds of completing high school rise from 39 percent to 53 percent for children exposed to preschool. (Heckman 2004)
By 21, those in one preschool program studied were more than four times more likely than non-participants to be enrolled in a 4-year college; were less likely to be unemployed and more likely to have higher earnings; had lower juvenile and adult crime rates; were less likely to depend on public assistance; and were less likely to be a teenage parent.(National Center for Children in Poverty)
PO Box 1904, Athens, GA 30603-1904 | 706-369-9732 | info@witathens.org
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