This is the second entry in the Families in Neighborhoods blog series. The series offers commentaries that explore efforts underway in Detroit, to reimagine neighborhoods as places of opportunity for children and families.

Last August, Kresge and several national funders worked with the U.S. Department of Education to host the summit on Strengthening Whole Child Communities: Raising the Bar from Cradle-to-Career held at Detroit’s Marygrove Conservancy. After the summit, Policy Equity Group started a learning community that brings together more than 40 local partnerships from across the United States. These groups work to support children and families from birth to career.

Since then, these organizations have met monthly to share lessons, celebrate successes, work through challenges and solve problems together as they try to better serve children and families in their communities.

These partnerships come from all types of American communities — city and rural areas with different racial and economic backgrounds. They all share the same goal: to make their communities places where children and families can succeed from birth through college, career and beyond.

Following the spirit of the summit, these partnerships bring together people from all sectors — education, housing, transportation, community development, health, social services and more. They work across different fields in each community, knowing that children don’t experience systems separately, but as part of the neighborhoods where they live.

Our next Families in Neighborhoods series post highlights the work of this learning community and how groups across the country are taking a whole-child, whole-family approach. In this Q&A, we hear from the Policy Equity Group, the early childhood consultancy that runs the community.

Q: How did the learning community members apply lessons from their experience at Marygrove to their work across the country?

A: To successfully support the whole child, communities must coordinate many programs and services that don’t easily fit together. Programs that help children and families are run by different government agencies and often have different rules, standards and ways to measure success. This makes it hard to create a smooth path of services from birth to career. The summit at Marygrove showed clear examples of how communities use schools as a hub to connect these services so children can thrive.

At the Marygrove Learning Community, participants saw real examples of building supportive communities: schools that lift family voices, one-stop access to health services, strong partnerships between organizations, data-driven decision-making and seamless support through a community school approach from birth to career. We see the learning community members using these strategies in their own work.

Perhaps the main lesson members took from the summit was that they aren’t alone. While every community is different, their goals and challenges are often the same. This realization sparked the creation of our learning community. As facilitators, we help keep this spark alive by providing a space where practitioners can learn from each other.

Q: What key issues are these cross-sector, place-based partnerships working on? How do they solve problems together?

A: Each month, we ask members to share their current challenges. This has led us to explore school health programs, rural program implementation, communication strategies and ways to support immigrant children and families. For each topic, we first make sure everyone has the same basic information, then dig into the practical details of making programs work. Our members told us clearly that they don’t want to just talk about problems — they want concrete solutions. So, we might spend time discussing how to make a school health center financially sustainable or even reviewing health consent forms.

For example, when discussing how to measure success, we invited Emily Germain from the Learning Policy Institute to present a guide for community schools. Then, Deanna Creighton-Cook from New Mexico’s ABC Community School Partnership showed how her partnership uses this tool in their community. Members then shared their own experiences and talked about how to measure their work’s impact.

Q: How has the mix of different sectors strengthened the learning community and led to better problem-solving?

A: Supporting children’s learning means addressing all their needs. It’s very hard for students to succeed if they’re hungry, can’t see what a teacher is presenting, or face barriers to attending school. Most places in the United States treat each issue separately, forcing families to navigate different agencies on their own. The whole-child approach thinks differently about student success. These partnership leaders understand that solving problems requires teamwork, connected support systems, family engagement and expanded learning opportunities — the key elements of community school transformation. Even something as simple as putting services in one location requires new partnerships, funding and ongoing collaboration.

Our community partners have shared several important lessons about working across sectors. They need a clear vision with ways to measure progress. This vision helps new partners understand how they fit in and creates ways for shared responsibility. When looking at student health centers, our Cincinnati partners explained business models for keeping programs going, including the need for high consent form completion rates so students can access services and schools can receive health funding. Finally, our meetings have highlighted how resource coordinators are essential in connecting outside partners, school staff, students and families.

Q: Why is taking a whole child, whole family approach across the birth-to-career journey so important?

A: This “why” question is at the heart of all our conversations. Today, more than ever, people in education and community work need to explain their value. Fortunately, data shows that whole-child, whole-family approaches help prepare students for college and careers. By respecting the knowledge of students, families, educators and other community members, communities can drive local change. As communities look for ways to be more efficient by bringing together different sectors, the result is thriving children and communities.

Q: What successful practices have learning community members shared that others can learn from?

A: One of the most valuable aspects of our learning community is hearing directly about what works. We’ve heard from Marsing Community School District in rural Idaho about how they created a community resource center (The Hub) using 19 different funding sources. This center serves the school community with everything from a food pantry to health services. As Superintendent Norm Steward taught us: “Sometimes in rural communities, there are no services to access. You have to create them yourself.”

We also highlighted Oyler Community Learning Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, a birth-to-grade-12 school that includes health, vision and dental centers. Annie Bogenschutz, executive director of the Community Learning Institute, along with the resource coordinator at Oyler , explained their model and answered many questions.

We’ve had rich conversations with the Learning Policy Institute and ABC Community School Partnership in Albuquerque about measuring outcomes and using data, and heard from a California community about supporting immigrant and refugee students.

Finally, it’s incredibly important for community leaders to have a space to connect. In their community work, these leaders often feel isolated. Providing a space where they receive support and learn that others across the country share their challenges and dedication to supporting children is perhaps the most important role of our learning community.

Jeffrey Capizzano is the president and founder of the Policy Equity Group. Emily Schroeder is a senior research analyst at the Policy Equity Group. Jonathan Hui is a senior program officer at The Kresge Foundation. 

Learn more about the Families in Neighborhoods series:

• Introducing ‘Families in Neighborhoods’: A new series focused on family-centered neighborhoods in Detroit
• Mobility trends of families with children and the role of public schools in Detroit’s neighborhoods