The children in Santa Barbara County enter school with a wide range of readiness skills, knowledge, and family experiences and those children who enter school behind in skill and knowledge or who come from stressful home situations, more often than not, are unable to catch up to their peers in academic achievement. This presents them with greater challenges throughout their school careers, which in turn limits their professional options and affects their long-term quality of life. Finding a sustainable solution to this problem has been central to the work of First 5 Santa Barbara County Commission for the last eleven years, so when in 2009 the Commission adopted their new 2010-2015 Strategic Plan, a major part of the plan was to maximize school readiness by further refining service delivery to benefit targeted, high need populations through long term results-based funding in specific neighborhoods.
These new promising place-based projects are known in Santa Barbara County as the “Community Collaboratives” and building upon the work of First 5, have been made possible by the creation of a unique partnership of public and private funders known as THRIVE. This entity, formed by First 5 of Santa Barbara County, the Orfalea Foundations, the James S. Bower foundation, the Hutton Parker Foundation, and the Santa Barbara Foundation, has as its main goal to build a cradle to career civic infrastructure focused on the development of strong neighborhoods of engaged parents, effective schools, integrated social services, safe recreational spaces, thriving businesses and authentic community connectivity.
Taking an innovative approach and having First 5 serve as the “Operating Partner” with the role of overseeing the contract management, technical assistance and evaluation, THRIVE has scaled up the effort by investing across the County of Santa Barbara in five communities of greatest need: Carpinteria, Guadalupe, Isla Vista, a neighborhood comprised by the boundaries of Fairlawn and Robert Bruce Elementary Schools in Santa Maria, and the Westside neighborhood in Santa Barbara.
Through the implementation of the Community Collaborative model, THRIVE is hoping to create a large systemic change supported by the compounded power of parents, schools, service agencies, and funders working together and being united by a shared vision. A core principle in this partnership is parent involvement because when parents are engaged in their children’s success at every stage, student success rates soar. By investing heavily in the early years, seeing each parent as their child’s first teacher, THRIVE’s deliberate effort is to promote a strong educational foundation that provides evidence-based parent education programs and high quality pre-Kindergarten learning opportunities to maximize school readiness and success.
EVALUATION
Within THRIVE’s collective impact paradigm the focus on data driven decision making for continued program improvement is crucial. Therefore, data integration, evaluation, and longitudinal research are central elements to this effort. All collaborative partners and THRIVE members have been part of determining the indicators and goals to track and all have committed to advancing these goals, assessing progress on key indicators, and utilizing data to make improvements as needed through the use of the Result-Based-Accountability framework. The first step in this process has been to determine data measures to provide a baseline point against which progress will be measured through the use of also agreed upon assessment instruments and screening tools, including the highly researched Kindergarten Student Entrance Profile (Lilles et al. 2009 and Quirk et al. 2011). The compilation of all agreed upon indicators has resulted in the Thriving Children Report Card; a tracked set of academic and life course outcomes in a child’s path into adulthood. This robust evaluation and research is conducted in partnership with the University of California Santa Barbara, Gevirtz Graduate School of Education in order to longitudinally study key outcomes for children prenatal through Grade 3 and beyond, to determine what it takes to “move the needle” in positive outcomes for children.
THRIVE Partnership Selects Anita Perez Ferguson as Executive Director
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Publications on THRIVE Community Collaborative Model
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To stay involved with THRIVE, visit www.THRIVEsbc.org