The UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies has partnered with Mann UCLA Community School to provide care packages for every single Mann UCLA SC student. Students receive school supplies, household items, and groceries.

323-541-1900

Youthprise and Minnesota Afterschool Advance are offering Chromebooks for no additional cost to families to help with distance learning this fall. Now, families can receive a Chromebook if they have a student in grades K-12 and they qualify for Free or Reduced Price Lunch or had a parent/guardian lose a job in 2020.

The initiative is accessible only to low-income families.

Matt Norris, Director of Minnesota Afterschool Advance, matt@youthprise.org, (763) 202-9012.

Founded in Miami in 2008, the Miami Music Project’s goal is to empower kids in underserved communities to reach their full potential and to positively impact society. The organization’s key program is the Children’s Orchestra, which operates through after-school programs in five low-income Miami neighborhoods. The project offers multiple programs, including the Children's Orchestra, Summer Camp, and Orchestra Boot Camp. The Summer Camp transitioned to online classes during the pandemic.

"The whole idea is about using music to bring social development … to kids with the greatest needs,” said Miami Music Project President Anna Klimala. Music helps them develop skills that will lead them to be successful, she said. The program and the musical instruments are provided for free. It challenges the prevailing system in which classical musicians are mostly white and mostly men.

(786) 422-5221, info@miamimusicproject.org

NextUp RVA and Richmond Public Schools have worked together for seven years to bring middle school students safe, high-quality opportunities to explore interests, express themselves, make friends and have fun! With the onset of the pandemic in early 2020, NextUp pivoted to a completely online model with its new virtual learning platform. Through designing this new platform enabling local area program providers to deliver virtual classes over the summer, NextUp knew they could extend their knowledge of online instruction to teachers at Richmond Public Schools for the upcoming 2020-2021 academic year. This partnership involved a presentation to Richmond Public Schools teachers on topics such as setting expectations for a virtual class, using activities to accommodate varying learning styles, ways to elicit interaction from students, technical best practices, and a process of continuous improvement.

NextUp believes in the importance of quality learning enrichments, which is why we lead a coordinated network of providers that have a common commitment to ensuring middle school students have access to quality expanded learning. We work to address equity in our program by first offering these classes free of charge, so every student has the opportunity to participate in these enrichments, and in providing training to our program providers on meeting the individual needs of students within those classes. In keeping with our commitment to ensuring equity, we designed this training for Richmond Public Schools teachers with the knowledge in mind that each teacher and ultimately each student will come to the virtual classroom with their own unique set of experiences, skills, and challenges. Our presentation addressed the importance of incorporating a variety of teaching methods, focused heavily on activities, to accommodate the varied learning styles of students. In addition, we addressed ways to facilitate virtual classes and encourage interaction with students in a variety of methods that would reach as many students as possible.

Jeanine Turner, NextUp RVA, jturner@nextuprva.org

PASA is a 17-year old organization, and pre-pandemic ran afterschool programming in school sites. In Fall 2020, PASA pivoted to municipal parks and recreation centers to house programming. PASA mapped the zip codes of PASA’s participant population to rec centers across the city and was able to secure four sites that are in walking distance to PASA’s youth. The kids will be able to join programming 2 days a week outside and indoors within their own neighborhoods, rather than being bused in as before.

PASA is committed to educational equity. 98% of the youth that participate in PASA are from low-income families. And, most of these youth do not have access to fee-based, privately run recreational or extended learning opportunities. In turn, they are not necessarily getting a whole-child, positive youth development centered-approach to education. According to PASA's Executive Director, “the afterschool community is filling these holes in innovative ways” and in ways that create community and youth relationships with caring adults. After all, “knowing how you are as a person is an important equity agenda.”

info@mypasa.org

Founded in 2005, Patterson Park Public Charter School is a community school. This means it creates a network of partnerships with other community resources that focus on a whole-child learning approach and promote student achievement and family and community well-being. As a community school, “which means we are a place and set of partnerships,” the Executive Director explains, Patterson Park Public Charter School already has long-standing relationships within its Southeast Baltimore community. Since the vision and mission of the school is helping the whole child, “we have to go way beyond classroom door” and build partnerships across the city that will have an impact on kids, says Dr. Charles Kramer, principal of the school.

Advancing equity is a strategic goal of the school, and a goal for the 2019-2020 academic year was for racial disparities in academic and behavior data will decrease through all aspects of theit Diversity, Equity, and Iinclusion plan. The school serves largely low-income youth of color. 100% of the students are eligible for free/reduced price lunches, 40% are English language learners, 49% are Black/African-American, and 35% are Hispanic/Latino.

(410) 558-1230

The Rally Analytics Platform is designed to enable tracking and reflection about the well-being and academic effects of how students are experiencing the world in recent months in one place. It will be live in November of 2020.

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REACH! engages with multiple aspects of the community to facilitate positive mental health and physical wellbeing of staff, students and families. REACH! runs a social-emotional session for staff on Zoom, where they do breathing exercises and check in with each other. They run several other social-emotional programs during the week for students. For fun — and a break from the loneliness and drudgery of staying at home — a school monitor who also happens to be a DJ runs an hour-long virtual dance party every Wednesday. REACH! also partners with local community organizations to provide a fresh produce farmers market on Saturdays and is a COVID testing site for the community.

James Gresham
443-642-2291

Relate918 began in 2017 to support preschool to fifth grade students’ learning after school. Relate918, funded by the Wallace Foundation, utilizes social-emotional learning strategies to support youth wellbeing. The program is a member of the Foundation's Partnerships for Social and Emotional Learning Initiative (PSELI), which studies whether and how students in urban schools will benefit if their schools and after school programming organizations work together to foster social-emotional learning.

Relate918 students are at ten different sites, most of which are elementary schools. At each site, an experienced group of adults leads programming. Some of these after school programming partners include: the YMCA, Tulsa Public Schools Aftercare, and Youth at Heart. Additionally, these groups coordinate enrichment activities for students that are provided by other community partners, such as Global Gardens and Bike Club.

This program provides youth with free after school programming, bridging the after school learning gap. The Wallace Foundation, which funds the program, and CASEL, which provides technical support, are both focused on equity in professional development and programming. These two groups are also committed to culturally appropriate and responsive programming.

Paige Kennedy
The Opportunity Project
pkennedy@theopp.org

Mill Creek Middle School and Restore-Assemble-Produce (RAP), offered intervention services, mentors, resources, and referrals for a diverse population of historically underserved middle schoolers. In all, the outcomes of this initiative include teaching students how to achieve and how to become self-sufficient. RAP is focused on increasing students’ abilities to cope and expand their social-emotional skills through engagement during the school day, after-school connections, parent partnerships, and mentorship programming. Also, RAP leaders create and lead professional development for staff focused on racial justice and trauma-informed practices.

best.starts@kingcounty.gov