Why is this work so crucial?
Their futures depend on it
Financial and social vulnerability take many forms within a community. From underfunded schools and resource instability to lack of essential services, each missing piece of the puzzle impacts student attendance, behavior and outcomes.
Why This Matters
As any experienced teacher will attest, what happens outside of the classroom has a direct impact on what happens inside the classroom, especially when that classroom is located in a community disproportionately affected by poverty. According to the American Educational Research Association (AERA), non-school factors, such as socio-economic challenges, impact student achievement at a rate of 3:1 when compared to school-controllable factors, like teacher certification.
Achievement by the Numbers
That means more than half of all students with declining test scores are struggling with obstacles the American school system was never designed to address. Though most educators and school administrators go above and beyond to serve their students, they simply cannot control what happens when the school day ends.
That's why this work matters.
By promoting collective accountability, critical support structures and coordinated efforts with stakeholders, we seek to create economic equity and help students graduate on time and fully prepared for a college or career path.
How COVID-19 Catalyzed Our Work
As the pandemic struck our community in 2020, our neighborhoods – like so many others – grappled first with how to effectively, efficiently, and equitably mobilize precious resources to address immediate needs. One guiding question organized much of our response: What will it take to ensure the Klondike and Smokey City communities’ stakeholders have the resources they need to weather this current crisis in order to ensure students don’t fall further behind?
Our organization’s COVID-19 initial relief strategy for Klondike & Smokey City advanced four interlocking components:
a timely & recurring needs survey;
authentic community outreach;
partnership and coalition work; and
facilitation and coordination of food distribution, financial, and other resources to fill the gaps experienced by residents, families, and scholars.
Addressing Root causes and Activating real solutions.
Our team spent much of 2020 focused on mobilizing resources to buffer Klondike and Smokey City households from the worst impacts of the pandemic. But what we quickly began to understand was that the real post-pandemic recovery work involved addressing the the equity and access gaps that have compounded generation after generation — the cracks in the very foundations of our city as highlighted by COVID.
Thanks to our supporters and partners, we’ve leveraged our recovery efforts to turn the heat up on our commitment to helping resident-leaders unmute themselves and activate policy advocacy to solve what ails their communities.