(After School Alliance) The Wallace Foundation has published a must-read report for all policy makers and afterschool advocates. The updated report highlights four essential components for building a successful citywide system of afterschool support. These systems require necessary conditions to ensure public support, dedicated funding and institutionalized policies and practices. A useful infographic on these elements of success can be found here. Currently, 77 of the 275 largest U.S. cities have some type of system in place to coordinate afterschool programming. The Wallace Foundation focused specifically on nine cities to develop these findings and plans to look at broader cross-sector partnerships as well as “collective impact” initiatives.
With many cities showing an interest in afterschool system building and research providing a growing body of useful information, this Wallace Perspective offers a digest of the latest thinking on how to build and sustain an afterschool system, and the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for this promising work. The report (a follow-up to a 2008 Perspective) focuses on the four components of system building that the most current evidence and experience suggest are essential:
- Strong leadership from major players: There is no substitute for a committed mayor or superintendent, but for a system to thrive long term, city agencies, private funders, schools, program providers and families all need to “own” the effort to some degree.
- Coordination that fits local context: A system’s coordinating entity can be a single public agency, multiple agencies working together, a nonprofit intermediary or a network of partners, depending on local needs.
- Effective use of data: Gathering and sharing data on a large scale takes both technology to track and organize information and a skilled staff to interpret and act on it.
- A comprehensive approach to quality: Cities must decide what program quality means to them, how “high stakes” to make their assessments of it and how to support continuous improvement of programs.
Click here to read the report.