By Leslie Boney

GREENSBORO (July 31, 2024) – It will be hard for any community to match the private investment that has gone into creating Guilford County’s “Ready for School, Ready for Life” initiative.

But observers and participants in the program and across the nation are looking closely at the program’s principles, design and products. Here are five ideas other communities might learn from as they consider creating a comprehensive, coordinated approach to early childhood services:

• Get everyone to the table – Every community has a unique set of organizations and assets to draw on, but it is critical to find a way to get all key players to the same table, agreeing on the same goals and principles. “What’s special about Ready, Ready,” says Brian Maness, President and CEO of the Children’s Home Society of NC and a Ready, Ready board member, “is the intentionality of bringing all these different systems together in all their complexity…people from the school system, the health system, family-serving nonprofits, social services and foundations all around the table together, with a commitment to community-driven, family-driven, data-driven decision-making.” A lead organization can play a critical role in ensuring that happens, he notes: “Without Ready, Ready, no singular partners would have been ready to take that on.”

 

• Blow up silos – In order to keep children from falling through the cracks, organizations need to find ways to share information. Ready, Ready has spent years developing an integrated data system that enables multiple organizations to share information about the challenges a family faces, who’s been helped and how, what’s worked and what hasn’t. Now the data system can serve as a model for other communities to improve communication across institutions, said Amy Cubbage, President of the NC Partnership for Children, a nonprofit focused on improving early childhood systems in North Carolina: “I know that has been tremendously expensive to build, but now that it’s built, it’s going to be easier for others to learn from that. It could be a real gamechanger if more places could get a system like that.”

 

• Listen to families – It’s one thing for institutions to decide what they think families might need; it’s another to find out what families actually need: “We’re not creating a system for someone,” says Mindy Oakley, executive director of the Edward M. Armfield, Sr. Foundation and co-chair of the Ready, Ready board. ”We’re creating a system together. We don’t have to speculate on what someone might need if we are already in conversation with that person.”

 

• Commit to learning – and a long road – Any group trying to implement a major change to a system needs to be realistic and patient, says Audrey Loper, who worked with Ready, Ready for six years as part of UNC-Chapel Hill’s Collaborative for Implementation Practice. “Sometimes there is an unrealistic expectation that there won’t be any hiccups, and we feel like we have to pretend it all went swimmingly. You need to be able to say to others, ‘Here are the challenges we faced. Here are the strategies we tried that didn’t work. Here’s what we had to manage behind the scenes.’” Loper recommends a commitment to Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) and “relentless documentation” by other communities taking on systemic change.

 

• Build public will – “There’s no way to do this work with only philanthropic dollars,” observes Oakley. “We’ve got to build public will. If we can prove what works, maybe we can get this funded with state and local government dollars.” Ready, Ready’s integrated data system and a rigorous evaluation by MDRC have the potential to demonstrate results that will convince governments they can invest more, or differently, in early-childhood efforts, and the investment can change the trajectory of a community. But you need to be in constant touch with those entities, says Loper: “If the intention is to eventually transition to public support of a program, you need to be doing relationship building, to be in constant contact, to develop a clear timeline and projections.”

 

FOR NOW, Ready, Ready’s focus is on the challenge of transforming one county’s early childhood system.

“We want to be successful in Guilford County,” says Maness. “If we do that, we will be positioned well to transfer some of the ideas.”

---

For an overview of Ready, Ready, click here.

Leslie Boney is a writer based in Raleigh. He has served as director of policy research and strategic planning at the NC Department of Commerce, Vice President for International, Community and Economic Engagement at the UNC System, and Vice Provost for Outreach and Engagement at NC State University.