2019 Annual Report Out
Connecting The Dots: Making A Difference
Last week Thursday, we gathered a small group of our partners at the Johnson Foundation and Wingspread to discuss the work of our partnership in 2019 and work through a collective impact activity to better understand how we can work together across sectors to support families.
To kick off the event, Jeff Neubauer, Executive Director of Higher Expectations, discussed how important it is for our partnership to work towards eliminating achievement gaps for our black residents. To do that, Jeff acknowledged that we all will have to change the way we think about how we work.
In the spirit of changing the way we think, we intentionally sat our participants with people they don’t traditionally work with to read through a case study about a family living in Racine. This fictitious family is experiencing multiple systemic barriers from cradle to career, based off of conditions know exist in Racine. We challenged participants to think about how to work together to support whole families collaboratively and what we can learn from the people most burdened by the system to better uncover strategies that move our work forward.
We followed this activity with sharing our data from 2019 and highlighting the great work being done by our partners at Racine Unified School District’s Academies of Racine and United Way’s collaboration with Racine Unified at two Racine Community Schools.
Dan Thielen, Chief of Schools at Racine Unified, discussed how the Academies of Racine has increased opportunities for high school students to work at youth apprenticeships and co-ops and earn college credit. He also shared that the comprehensive high school’s School Report Card Accountability scores have all increased.
Ali Haigh, President and CEO at United Way of Racine County, discussed how the Community Schools is working to engage families and support parents. At Knapp Elementary, they have seen improvement in the School Report Card Accountability score of closing the gap - showing that the Community Schools model is working to decrease equity gaps for students.
Some key takeaways from our report out event are:
Our partnership would like to increase access to more cross-sector resources and information to better support families with challenges our partners may not be the experts on, and give better informed referrals.
Our partnership would like to look at collaborative funding options and funding opportunities that encourage/incentive collaboration.
Our partnership would like to increase their knowledge of our community member’s strengths and priorities to better engage and support families in the community.
We ended our event with an announcement of a larger event on May 15 2020 that will focus on bringing the community into our work. For a closer look at our 2019 Annual Report - Connecting The Dots, Making A Difference - click here.