LIVE UNITED Y’All!

By Christopher Locke

Wow, it’s that time of the year again! A time when young people of all ages have visions of cartoon-covered backpacks, reams of three-hole, loose leaf paper and bounties of yellow Number 2 pencils dancing in their heads… Which means it’s indeed time for school! With the return to school and visions in mind, I’m reminded of a Henry David Thoreau quote that says “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”

And while most parents and adults in the community are expectedly looking at purchasing items like sports and band uniforms, instruments, or even lab supplies to support their children’s education success in the classroom and school– a lot of well-meaning and caring adults have been spending a lot of time creating a compelling child-centered, community-based vision for young people to be successful outside the classroom and school. These caring adults and young people were callers, conveners and participants in a community effort called the Youth Vision. It was exciting to participate and witness the process of developing a vision that the community can be proud of that will also mobilize us to action.

The community response to an invitation from a group of youth development and education experts convened by Metro United Way to come and share their thoughts on youth success was overwhelming. When all the conversations were complete, 36 community conversations had taken place with residents from 30 of the 32 zip codes in the Louisville Metro area, from 11 other Kentucky zip codes and from 3 Southern Indiana County zip codes. The participant demographics revealed that the conversations had attracted broad and diverse participation from community residents interested in young people.

And as Thoreau said, they looked at some things. In fact, the participants looked at a long list of depressing challenges that often impede many young people’s paths to educational success.

• 1 in 4 freshman entering 9^th grade in JCPS don’t graduate on time and in four years with their peers.
• 65% of JCPS students are on free and reduced lunch.
• Worse still, last year JCPS reports that 10,500 students were classified as homeless.

In all three cases, a disproportionate number of the students are African American and Latino.

But again, like Thoreau wisely recommended, the community residents participating in the youth vision conversations did not get mired in pessimism. No, instead, this spirited group, led by Metro United Way and Metro Government, decided that the callers and the residents see what matters. So the optimists flipped the deficit-based reality that many of our students and families deal with everyday on its head and decided to engage resident voices in the process by asking three strengths or asset-based questions.

• Think about a young person in your life…What are your hopes and wishes for their success?
• What helps a young person be successful?
• If you could waive a magic wand, how would our community look different if ALL youth were succeeding?

After over 500 people had answered, the compelling Youth Vision emerged.

Louisville Youth…

• Have the skills and education to be self reliant, healthy, engaged and economically thriving.
• Have hope and show strength of character to achieve their goals, follow their dreams, respect others and contribute to bettering their community and world.
• Live in a caring community where everyone values, supports, invests in and fights for their success.

It sounds  pretty compelling to me, and we hope you agree! What are some of your ideas for our community’s youth? Would you be willing to act in creative ways to bring this vision to life in the community? How?

Advocacy, Education, General back to school, Children, Community, Education, future, High School Graduation, kindergarten, making a difference, Metro United Way, opportunity, parenting, Southern Indiana, students, success, youth, youth development, Youth Vision

By Jan Sherrell
One of Metro United Way’s goals is that:
By 2018, 87% of our community’s high school students graduate from high school on time. Currently our community’s graduation rate is 73%.

We sometimes refer to it as a BOLD GOAL. We recognize that we alone can not make that change for our community. We are working with partners to explore what out of school time programs are working and what areas they service. We know that food and housing and mental health are just a few of the factors that can also affect the success rate of kids in school. But just naming the goal and proclaiming it is a step toward making it happen.

I’ve experienced this personally –goal setting and proclaiming it.

As a youth it wasn’t emphasized to me that after high school comes college. In fact I didn’t even entertain ideas of college until a high school counselor, looking at my grades and scores encouraged me to think about continuing my education past high school. It was not an expectation in my family to pursue college. I didn’t even dream that dream. We were a middle-class working family with five kids and a stay-at-home mom.

This counselor sparked something in me and I began to consider college. By working from age 16 and with student loans, I was able to attend a local college, but I didn’t have a clear goal or major or career in mind. My motivation and commitment was lacking and I followed the classic “fall in love and get married” path — which has been good and I’m still married 28 years later — but it nagged me that I didn’t complete a degree.

I decided in 2008, that I would complete my degree. I set a goal. It certainly felt like a BOLD GOAL to me. I was 46 years old and pretty rusty at studying and taking tests. My days already seemed full, how was I going to fit college into my life and family budget? Fact is, I wasn’t very thorough in my planning. I didn’t forecast how long or how much money I would be investing. I just knew it was something I always wanted and I went for it.

I’m now 13 hours short of my degree; it is going to happen.

There are many, many youth out there just like I was. They need encouragement. They need to hear that great things are expected of them and that they can do it; it really is a culture thing. Children are being raised without the goal and expectation of completing high school. All families do not emphasize the importance of education..

Maybe it is your role to help a young person set a BOLD GOAL, and to help them reach that goal. It will take the entire community to increase the graduation rate to 87%, but YOU can help that one child recognize the importance of education and completing high school.

Do you have a story to share like mine?  Do you know a young person who had someone make a difference in their success?

General Education, goals, graduation

by Mary Ann Steutermann

I’ll admit it – I have few domestic skills. In particular, I absolutely, positively do not cook because 1) I don’t enjoy it and 2) previous attempts have resulted in blaring smoke alarms and upset stomachs. Fortunately for me, I am married to a great cook who both enjoys the process of creating a fine meal and actually produces dishes that people find not only edible but downright delicious. Over the years, I have watched him in the kitchen preparing a meal, and I’ve learned his secret to success – preparation.

The Right Ingredients

I was surprised to learn that most of my husband’s culinary efforts go into selecting the best ingredients and then spending quite a bit of time cutting, chopping, dicing, and seasoning them. In fact, he probably spends at least twice as much time preparing the ingredients as he does actually heating something on the stove or baking it in the over. Similarly, Metro United Way has been hard at work preparing to develop a strategy map that will guide our efforts in the coming years as we work to ensure that all of our children arrive at kindergarten ready to be successful and that at least 87% of them complete high school by earning their diplomas.

Just as it’s tempting to jump right into to turning up the heat on the stove without taking the time to chop and season the ingredients first, it’s tempting for an organization to jump too quickly to decisions about its future work without doing the necessary leg work in preparation. But we won’t make that common mistake. In fact, we’ve been hard at work in the kitchen for several months now.

Engaging the Community

Before settling on our specific strategies in support of educational progress, we have been doing a lot of homework. An essential part of this has been engaging the community in various ways in order to make sure we have all of the data and information needed to make good decisions. We have been working with various groups to get their feedback on our emerging role as leaders in community support of educational progress. So far we have engaged the community through:
• Donor conversations
• Colleague discussions
• CEO calls
• CSC committee discussions
• Council of Agency Executives discussions
• CI Cabinet conversations

Another major engagement opportunity we have embarked upon is an Education Research Project in conjunction with Kentucky Youth Advocates. In addition to providing the latest research on how to promote high school graduation and reporting on essential quantitative data by county, the project has also engaged superintendents, principals, government officials, business persons, faith-based leaders, parent organization leaders, service providers, and various other community movers and shakers on their perceptions of both strengths as well as perceived needs. This will allow us to not only identify what is going on in each county in each of the 5 “tipping points” of the UWW education framework (kindergarten readiness, 4th grade reading, middle school transition, high school graduation, and college/career), but it will also let us also know what the community feels they most need to see improvement in educational attainment.

We are in the process of planning community forums in each county to discuss the results and get further input during October and November. We’ll keep you posted on this!

Lessons Learned

Without a doubt, I will never cook a sumptuous meal that meets with the praise (and shock) of my family and friends. But lots of us at MUW have been hard at work in the kitchen doing the prep work on another masterpiece – a framework for moving forward as community leaders in support of greater educational attainment. Watching my husband prepare a wonderful meal has taught me that an ideal result to any creative endeavor takes patience, preparation, and persistence. Even though the thought of applying these traits in a real live kitchen gives me hives, I’m thrilled to be applying them to our emerging plan for helping our community meet its educational goals.

Advocacy, Education, General advocate, Children, Community, Education, engagement, future, Louisville, making a difference, Metro United Way, research, strategic planning, youth

With school having just started back, education seems to be on everyone’s mind.  Getting over the anxieties and challenges of starting a new school year can be a big hurdle – especially if your child is entering kindergarten or a new school.  This year, my son is a 5^th grader at a school that he has attended since pre-school, but my daughter started at a new school as an incoming 6^th grader entering middle school.  At orientation, she remarked “This place is BIG!”  As a parent putting myself in her shoes, I couldn’t have agreed more.

When children have a supportive family and a stable home environment, doing well in school can still be a significant challenge.  Keeping up with all of their subjects, text books, assignment sheets, daily reading, and long-term projects can be a tall task!  However, there are much greater challenges being faced by large numbers of children in our community.

Last year, 10,555 students in Jefferson County Schools were homeless at some point during the year.  To me, that number is staggering, both in terms of volume, as well as impact for each child.  I think about how difficult it must be to try to focus on academics when you may not know where you are going to eat or sleep.  Even if you’re staying with another family, sleeping on a couch in the living room is a far cry from sleeping in the comfort of your own bed in a private space.  It’s also painful to think about the many situations which may have caused the unstable housing to begin with – the loss of a job, a serious illness or death in the family, a lack of financial resources, chemical dependency, mental illness, domestic violence.  Every situation is unique.

Fortunately for us, our community is thinking about some of these most challenged students and how we can support them to make sure they have a fighting chance in school.  Organizations like the Metropolitan Housing Coalition, the Coalition for the Homeless and systems like Jefferson County Public Schools, our Kentucky’s Department of Community Based Services (child welfare), and Family Courts are teaming up to discuss how we can better support homeless children and their families, and how all of our systems can work together to ensure all children have every chance to be successful, by addressing their holistic needs.  When organizations and individuals come together around common goals, amazing things can happen.

I invite you to consider what it would be like to be in a homeless child’s shoes trying to learn in the classroom.  What images does this evoke for you?  How could taking on this perspective help us all as a community to better support these children’s academic success and long-term stability? 

Education, General Add new tag, Children, Coalition for the Homeless, Education, future, homeless, Jefferson County Public Schools, Live United, Louisville, making a difference, Metro United Way, Metropolitan Housing Coalition, parenting, youth

By Mary Ann Steuterman
Director of Education Initiatives, Metro United Way

Mary Ann Steuterman

At a social function recently, an acquaintance asked me how I liked my new job. Having been Director of Education Initiatives at Metro United Way for just 3 months at the time, I talked about the excitement of learning new things, the frustration of having so many new things to learn, and the fun and fulfillment of facing a new, meaningful professional challenge. That’s when she said it. And it shocked me like a glass of ice cold water was thrown at my face. My acquaintance, who knew I had been a teacher, assistant principal, and principal for 20 years before my recent professional transition said that the new job is all well and good, and she’s happy for me and all, but, “It’s such a shame you left education.”

Left education?!? Not even close!

While Metro United Way continues to do what its always done by mobilizing the caring power of community to address so many vital human needs, we are also working hard to address the root causes of those conditions so that down the road, the level of need isn’t as great as it is today. An important way we do this is through a focus on providing essential community support for educational progress.

Why education? Unfortunately, the reasons are many in number and great in impact. Globally, it’s become all too clear in recent years that our country is simply not keeping up. There are more math and science majors in China today that there are total students in the U.S. We no longer lead the world in the percentage of our population that earns college degrees and are falling further behind each year. Nationally, the dropout rate in the public schools of our 10 largest cities is an abysmal 50%. Half of these young peope are African American, and 70% are unemployed. In the past, those who did not pursue a college education could find meaningful work and a good living in the military, but no longer. An amazing 75% of young adults 17 to 25 today can not enter a branch of military service for three common reasons: obesity, a felony conviction, or lack of a high school diploma.

But the problems are not just global or even national in scale. Right here in our own backyard, lack of educational attainment has kept our community from excelling. Between 1/3 and ½ of our kindergarteners arrive at school unprepared to succeed, and 27% of our students don’t graduate high school on time. Communities with a smaller percentage of high school dropouts and a greater percentage of college degree-holders require less spending on social services and enjoy the fruits of greater economic development. By working with all of our supporters and community partners to address these foundational problems, we can build a stronger community whose needs in the future aren’t as daunting as they appear today.

Left education? Not a chance. I have to admit that I was hurt by the comment of that acquaintance who thought that I had wasted my educational background and talents by leaving a school environment to work in another setting. On the contrary, for someone who truly seeks to have a positive impact on her community through a focus on education like I do, Metro United Way is the perfect place for me to be.

Education Education, job change, working in education

by Natalie Harris

Photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid - click for link

Oh, the iPhone.  In my house, it made an appearance just a few months ago.

Boy. has it ever.

My husband really can justify having one (he runs his own business, has no assistant, and is out visiting sites all over the city throughout the day),  but as his attachment to this lovely little device grows and grows, so does my level of frustration.

“But look at all that it helps me do!” he says.  He can send e-mail while at a jobsite!  He can get directions!  He can check prices!  He can take photos!  He can miss conversations!  He can forget to talk to our toddler!  He can help our teenager tune out even more by handing it to him at family functions!

Harrumph.

So when I came across this New York Times article yesterday, The Risks of Parenting While Plugged In, did I ever get excited.  Proof!  Validation of my recent tirades in black and white!  Sudden reason to examine my commitment to my laptop!  Wait — uh-oh.

As I overheard a friend of mine saying last night, “It’s hard being married to a righteous man.”  Ouch.  Turns out I’m the righteous one in the family, and the problem with all that righteousness is that you start to become blind to your own flaws;  I am just as guilty of distraction by way of e-mail, facebook, or, irony of ironies, The New York Times website.

I know that in this world where everyone –work, family and friends – expects us to be accessible all the time that it’s incredibly difficult to turn off all that distraction.  But as the article above points out, this constant need to stay connected electronically gets in the way of the meaningful connections in our lives, especially with our children.

Young children, in particular, need that connection to us.  They need it to develop language skills, to build their social skills, and to simply engage and learn about the world around them.  When we’re tuned into the smartphone at the playground, or even at the grocery store, we’re missing critical opportunities for learning.

As part of our Success By 6 work, one of the major initiatives here at Metro United Way, we’ve connected to a nationwide program called Born Learning.  Born Learning promotes using everyday life as a learning opportunity, and offers lots of guidance and suggestions on how to make it happen.  For many of us, this may seem intuitive, but I know I could definitely use a refresher, and to remember to turn off the computer between the hours of 5:00pm-9:00pm ( AND to hide that iPhone).

Education, General Children, early childhood, Education, parenting, reading, Success By 6, youth

By: Kerri Cokeley

In an effort to help reduce America’s high school dropout rates, America’s Promise Alliance is supporting more than 100 state and local Dropout Prevention Summits across the country.

On September 25^th I attended the first Indiana Dropout Prevention Leadership Summit. I participated in this meeting with a group of education professionals and concerned citizens from Clark County, a local workgroup convened by Landon Samuels of State Farm. There were hundreds of folks in attendance at this statewide conference, including some from Floyd and Harrison Counties as well.

The luncheon keynote speaker was Bill Milliken. Bill has been a tireless advocate for disenfranchised youth and one of the foremost pioneers in the movement to connect schools with community resources to help troubled students graduate and succeed in life. In 1977, he and others developed a model organization, now known as Communities In Schools.

The Communities In Schools model believes that each child needs and deserves the “5 Basics:”

1. A one-on-one relationship with a caring adult

2. A safe place to learn and grow

3. A healthy start and a healthy future

4. A marketable skill to use upon graduation

5. A chance to give back to peers and community

Each of these “5 Basics” makes so much sense to me as I think back to my childhood and what helped me get to where I am today. When thinking about how to help the students falling through the cracks of society today, it’s hard to keep from getting overwhelmed.

Something that Bill Milliken said as he was speaking resonated with me deeply, “America doesn’t have a youth problem. America has an adult problem.” I couldn’t agree more.

This leaves me with a question for you: What are we, the adults, going to do to help make sure the young ones in our life, and in our community, have the support they need to be successful?

P.S. The Evening News did a great job of capturing the essence of the statewide event (click here to see the article.)

Advocacy, Education, General America's Promise, Education, graduation rates, State Farm

Hi ya’ll. I hope this message finds you well. I’m writing this entry in anticipation of my trip to the National Conference on Family Literacy. All of my enthusiasm for this trip isn’t just because it’s held in Orlando, FL and I leave tomorrow for warm, sunny days. I’m most excited because of all the great keynote speakers and informational sessions they have planned. (I know, just by admitting that, it only further confirms my nerdiness…)

All that aside, family literacy is a very serious issue. Have you ever thought about how hard it must be for a child raised in a household with very low literacy levels to be successful in school? And if a child isn’t successful in school, research shows that the odds are unlikely for them to be successful in adulthood. Then the cycle continues.

Over the past three years, I have worked to broaden my definition of literacy. When I used to hear that word I thought it only meant someone’s ability to read and write. But, that’s not the only definition. It also means being knowledgeable on a particular subject.

So, let me reconsider the previous example with this new definition.

• Imagine how hard it must be for a child raised in a household with low financial literacy levels to grow up and spend their money wisely.
• Imagine how hard it must be for a child raised in a household with low social literacy levels to interact well with their peers in school and later in the workplace.
• Imagine how hard it must be for a child raised in a household with very low parenting literacy levels to grow up to be the kind of mommy or daddy their child deserves.

Imagine if every family could recognize an area where they could build their literacy levels and had the courage to ask for help - and when they did - their community provided the support they needed. This is exactly what we are working to do in Southern Indiana with our new Legacy of Literacy initiative.

This project is in its very early stages of planning, but we are very hopeful of the positive change it can help create. Would you like to be a part of helping make this change? We would love to have you.

Photo credit: ::: Billie / PartsnPieces :::

Education 4community2, Education, functional literacy, Legacy of Literacy, National Center for Family Literacy, Southern Indiana

If you were to close your eyes and think about your ideal place to live, what would come to mind?  For some of us, it would be a cottage on a beach where it was warm all year long.  For others, it would be living in the mountains or on several acres out in the country.  But let’s think about living here in the Louisville area.  We’ve already got a lot of things that make living here good: museums and the arts, sports, beautiful parks, entertainment, top-notch health care, plenty of shopping and restaurants, the Ohio River, colleges and universities, and the Derby, to name a few. 

But let’s dare to dream even bigger.  What other things would we want in our ideal metropolitan area?  How about if every child was wanted and loved, kept safe, and was given every chance to develop his/her mind and talents?  What if marriages were strong and loving and couples received the coaching and guidance they needed to make their marriage healthy and vibrant?  What if every older adult was loved and given the resources he/she needed to remain as independent as possible for as long as possible?  And when that was no longer possible, that they would be assured of having people around them who cared well for them and helped them to maintain their dignity.

Wouldn’t it be great to live in a community where people who have physical and mental disabilities were accepted as equals and where their human worth would be valued?  Imagine a place where animals were cared for and wouldn’t live their lives chained or caged or neglected or abused.  How about living in a place where people took seriously their responsibility to tread lightly on the earth so that future generations would have a healthy and beautiful place to live?  Would you like to live in a place where everyone who wanted to further their education had the ability to do so?  What if we lived in a place where everyone who wanted a job had one, and that job paid a living wage so that everyone could afford decent housing and could provide a reasonable standard of living for themselves and their family?

To quote John Lennon, “You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one.”  Together, we can bring this city and the surrounding area closer to our ideal vision.  But in order to build a place that better suits the needs of everyone, we need everyone’s voice and everyone’s help.  So speak up.  What does your ideal community look like?

Advocacy, Education, Health, Income Advocacy, Community, Education, Health, Income, Louisville, opportunity