Today, the Evanston Community Foundation is one year into implementation of an impact plan to guide its first-ever strategic grantmaking initiative.  That plan, Every Child Ready for Kindergarten, Every Youth Ready for Work, was shaped over the course of 30 months of listening, research, and consulting with people from many walks of life throughout this community (2004 to 2006).  This plan has drawn more than $300,000 in contributions to implement its first two years—and the endowment that will sustain such work in perpetuity already stands at $600,000, with an immediate goal of $2.5M.  We have a plan that we are implementing, and we seek to build endowments to support and expand what we are doing.

Four years ago, in 2003, Chicago-based Grand Victoria Foundation issued a path-breaking RFP to the state’s community foundations. Their proposal to build community foundations went beyond well-known partnerships between large private foundations and community foundations in other Midwestern states and in California. Grand Victoria had learned that communities up and down the state all faced challenges in the areas of early childhood education and childcare; workforce training and development; and land use and protection.  These issues might find different expression in different communities, but these were issues that resonated throughout Illinois, and they were issues that reflected Grand Victoria’s priorities in the areas of education, economic development and the environment.

The foundations were challenged to explore intersections among the target issue areas and to determine how to address local challenges in ways that made sense for the community’s assets and key actors, the desires of community members, and the knowledge of its community foundation.  The tools would include board willingness to support the effort, an engaged advisory committee, at least one staff person, a series of four public meetings, and development of a formal impact plan that would lead to at least $50,000 in awards prior to July of 2008.  Grand Victoria, for its part, would provide each foundation $280,000 in capacity-building support of its operations, and $250,000 to match contributions to endowment over the five year period.

Each foundation developed its own local approach, aided by extraordinary field liaisons, conference calls with people from across the country who had done similar work, occasional workshops and annual meetings of the entire partnership—18 foundations initially, and 17 since 2005.   Grand Victoria was building a network of foundations that was gaining experience and momentum in thinking strategically about community philanthropy. 

Here in Evanston,  our extensive process of community meetings and other research led us to adopt a focus on home visits in 60 vulnerable families (15% of the target population) with children ages birth to three as the starting point  in developing a path to Kindergarten readiness for all our children.  A critical point in our plan is the connection to the young adults these very young children will become as we think across the years.  From the beginning, our plan was to focus on developing people who can afford to live in the community where they were raised. When we learned that nearly 90% of the young adults that Evanston’s Youth Job Center seeks to place in full-time jobs are single, custodial parents, we knew the linkages we’d made among issue areas were putting us on a productive path for Evanston’s future.

The Communityworks Advisory Committee (see attached list) presented its recommendations to the Foundation’s Board, and the plan was approved in June of 2006.  This allowed us to issue an RFP of our own to agencies that were doing work here in Evanston with children in the birth to three age range. 

That RFP held the fruits of a highly collaborative style of information gathering and checking back with our informants, with those who would ultimately be doing the work.  We intentionally modeled our own project  upon the Communityworks collaborative learning model in which we were engaged with the Grand Victoria Foundation.  We wanted to be sure that our foundation would be learning all along the way, that we could begin with baselines, know the story, be inventive as we learned about obstacles and opportunities. We knew, after all, that our first year’s activities would be a highly focused starting point from which to build outwards.

Our impact plan as fully launched in 2007 has six strands:

1—Home Visits by trained professionals using two research-tested models, Baby Talk and Parents as Teachers.  Home visitors have been hired and trained primarily by two agencies, each supported by partner agencies providing such supportive services as literacy programs for parents, reflective supervision, and support in recruiting families.  $60,000 to each collaboration in 2007.

2---Capacity-building funds for the umbrella organization, Childcare Network of Evanston, that convenes all the city’s childcare agencies and preschools. Our major immediate goal is decreasing their dependence on government grants and increasing private and individual support.  In addition to outright grant funds for a resource development person and for multi-cultural training, we hope to illustrate the economic benefits of investing in early childhood to help make the case for increased giving.  Approximately $15,000 in 2007.

3---Make continuing education more readily available and less costly for the community’s early childhood educators, by bringing classes into the community, raising the level of training in the classroom and leadership levels.  Funding and partner institutions TBD,  to begin in 2008.

4---Connection with District 65 to determine which information is material and how to collect/report data on incoming Kindergarteners and their pre-K experiences to measure impact and adjust approaches.

5---Program assistance for the community foundation to work with the agencies in both collaborations, collecting information to help tell the story of our work, measure success, secure other resources, build program capacity within the community foundation, arrange for evaluation.  $10,000 in 2007.

6—Engagement of an evaluation consultant (on faculty at NIU) to train home visitors in using agreed-upon assessment instruments, collect the data, and report to the Foundation.  $4500 in 2007.

We will continue to work with our first 60 families, seeking to make an affordable bridge to quality preschools, connecting to Kindergarten; if funding also permits, we would like to expand the numbers of families in the home visit program.  Providing access to nurses’ perspectives, building bridges to the medical community, providing roving substitutes for teachers pursuing their education---there are many possible enhancements to the basic program launched this year. 

To be successful in making an impact on the multi-faceted challenges embedded in the term “ready for Kindergarten” is a big challenge—even in a community as small as Evanston.  It will take resources beyond those of any one organization and the Community Foundation hopes to engage the resources of others to reach this goal that is of great importance to Evanston residents.  Part of this is that we see ourselves at the Evanston Community Foundation as the hub for the pre-K community, similar to the roles of District 65 and 202 for older students, and the continuum of babies to young adults embedded in our impact plan reinforces this.   Documenting and telling the story of the work is one important means to expanding the resources available for it   Engaging new partners to work with us is also important.  For these reasons we are especially interested in forming partnerships with researchers at Northwestern.  We believe that our work could be a meaningful project for a researcher in education and social policy, and look forward to making this happen. 

The Community Foundation has worked with graduate students in communications and management on small projects. We participate in the Kellogg Board Fellows program. We have absorbed Northwestern undergraduates and their projects in such programs as Service Learning and the Undergraduate Leadership Program.   We have partnered with Dance Marathon for a decade, helping student leaders to build their annual efforts from fundraising into philanthropy.

An overview of issues that emerged in our community scanning and research:

The most pressing problems in early childhood education and childcare centered around

• Costs: funding and finances for providers and families
• Staffing: pay, benefits, accreditation, supply of teaching staff
• Unserved and underserved populations within Evanston
• Data, evaluation and quality

A broad community consensus emerged that all Evanston children should have access to high quality, affordable early childhood care and education that incorporates kindergarten readiness, early intervention, parent education, and well-paid providers. Overall themes underlie that consensus: commitment to quality and equity, appreciation for the benefits of data and research, and respect for collaboration.

The most pressing problems are patterns of early childhood education and childcare determined by economic access and aligned with later outcomes in school.  Evanston appears to have a sufficient supply of childcare spots for children under 5, but approximately 26% of spaces are in license-exempt centers and homes, according to Action for Illinois Children. A system of identifying and working with families who fall outside the licensed childcare environment is not in place, particularly those who do not qualify for a state subsidy but whose incomes make high-quality centers unaffordable and who are then using license-exempt or more informal arrangements. The concern is that in some cases, children in license-exempt settings may have access to a less rich preschool and literacy environment, putting them at later risk of school difficulties. 

Of the approximately 700 children who enter public school kindergarten in Evanston each fall, around 10% test below the 20th percentile on the Illinois Snapshots of Early Literacy (ISEL) and another 25% fall below the 50th percentile.  The achievement gap that falls along racial lines, so visible in high school, is already clear-cut by the third grade. Information collected in kindergarten predicts its emergence.

Professional development and pay-scale within the ECE community are sobering.  Illinois figures for childcare workers in November 2004 are below the national mean on an hourly basis ($8.46 hourly) but above it on an annual basis at $19,130.  For preschool teachers, the Illinois mean is $11.71 on an hourly basis and $24,370 annually.

Evidence of connections among the issues emerged in our public meetings.  As Julia Parzen noted following our public meetings, there is clearly a sense that many Evanstonians are “lost in the middle”. An even better word may be “squeezed.” For this group, it is difficult to afford quality childcare, producing family tension and affecting educational achievement. These Evanstonians are also more likely to suffer the consequences of difficult access to workforce training and development—particularly serious for non-college bound or non-college educated residents.  Housing is increasingly unaffordable, and the supply of rental housing is shrinking.

Race and diversity in Evanston: Potential asset, current obstacle.  Another opportunity is the consensus that the community’s diversity is a potential asset not yet fully tapped. Issues of race and class permeate most conversations about community issues but are usually not explicitly confronted or discussed in a constructive way.  Diversity draws people to Evanston and is often cited as a key community asset, but the strong sense of unequal opportunity aligned along racial and class lines is both the source of malaise and frustration and a concern that drives many residents to want to become part of community solutions.

When some in the community speak with pride of Evanston’s diversity, they are citing the potential to bridge divisive gaps. When others speak of “drive-by diversity” and of concerns that maintaining diversity may signal a commitment to the status quo of wealth for some and economic deprivation for others, what lies between them are significantly different ways of experiencing the community. Some larger non-profit organizations date back to the days when the community was racially segregated. Not everyone feels at home in them today, despite the development of more inclusive boards, programs, and outreach efforts.