BRIGHT SPOT: FAST INITIATIVE, North Carolina
In June 2020, Kim Keith at the YMCA of the Triangle got a phone call. Wake County Public School System asked about the capacity of the Y. The county estimated that they needed twenty thousand spots to serve kids in the upcoming school year. Not twenty. Not two thousand. Twenty thousand spots.
The Y knew that they did not have that kind of capacity alone. They also knew that by banding together with other youth development organizations in the area, it might be possible to meet the needs of the youth and families of Wake County Public School System when online remote schooling began in the Fall. The Y got on the phone. By August, the Families and Schools Together (FAST) Initiative was formed.
The FAST Initiative is a partnership among six lead partners: the Wake County Public School System, WakeEd Partnership, the YMCA of the Triangle, Marbles Kids Museum, Boys & Girls Clubs Serving Wake County, and the Parks Recreation and Cultural Resources Department of the City of Raleigh. It further involves local churches, private childcare providers, and local city parks and recreation departments. To realize their shared partnership goal of an academic-child care collaborative, the partners have all agreed to provide high-quality learning environments, as well as recreational and extended learning activities for youth. They are also committed to access for all; all youth and families in the Wake County Public School System can participate, irrespective of ability to pay. Programming for youth is available five days a week, from 7:30 am to 6 pm, and adherence to local, state, and federal health and safety regulations for childcare during the pandemic is mandated.
Although the Y has a long-standing relationship with a school district in the area, the partnership among the youth development organizations and local municipalities is new. And it requires communication. According to Keith (YMCA of the Triangle), the FAST Initiative lead partners talk to each other almost every day, and they meet formally with the childcare partners each week.
As the FAST Initiative takes hold in the here and now, the partners are also planning for the future. They hope to be able to secure funding for free care. The partnership has set up a fundraising working group that meets separately to raise funds and address grant requests. They also are thinking about how to measure success collectively. All of the partners have their own programming model and internally collect different data and use different measures. They are moving into using and sharing data as a group to identify the common needs of youth and families. The FAST Initiative is intended to last through the pandemic, and it holds the possibility to address other gaps in the school and out-of-school time relationship in the future.
The FAST Initiative is one of many examples highlighted in the new Bright Spots Collection, funded by the SD Bechtel Jr. Foundation. The collection will be live in a few weeks, and complements and extends the work of the Readiness Projects by offering examples of the ideas and strategies promoted by social sector partnerships. In the meantime, we’ll feature Bright Spots in a special series on this blog. If you have one you want us to check out, leave a response below or email us at brightspots@collaborativecommunications.com.
