The Forsyth Promise is pleased to announce they’ve been chosen by national nonprofit StriveTogether for a grant award of $150,000 through the Cradle to Career Community Challenge grant program. The Forsyth Promise is one of 21 cradle-to-career partnerships that will advance and spread bold strategies to help children and families access opportunity and move up the economic ladder.
“The data from our 2018 report is clear: although many core community education measures are holding steady or improving for aggregate students, our system is not working for all students. There are significant disparities in outcomes across all measures for which disaggregated data is available and these disparities fall along racial / ethnic and socio-economic lines,” said Wendy Poteat, Partnership Director of The Forsyth Promise.
The grant award from StriveTogether will allow The Forsyth Promise to build a network of grassroots community advocates and leaders. These grassroots leaders will:
- share data and lived experiences to build a common perspective of our challenges and opportunities,
- collaborate on identifying the most critical issues to prioritize,
- and advocate and mobilize to move the needle on these community-wide priorities for education.
Wendy Poteat continues, “The difficult challenges we face will not be quickly or easily resolved. They require our community to build new relationships, work across sectors, coordinate, and align. New solutions require a willingness to change the ways we think and work; this grant award allows us to take a big step in that direction by putting grassroots community voice and lived experience at the center of our work. This is an exciting day for Forsyth County.”
The Forsyth Promise has received a grant from the Promising Practices Fund, which is intended to find local projects applying bold strategies that can be spread across StriveTogether’s national network. These projects will focus on deeper community engagement and align education with other sectors such as health, housing and transportation. Eleven community-based organizations were awarded grants of up to $150,000 for one year.
Through the Community Challenge, up to $7 million over the next three years will fund projects across the country that advance equity and spread bold strategies to help students progress from kindergarten to postsecondary completion and a job. During this round of grants, 10 communities also were selected for the Accelerator Fund. Communities in the StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network were eligible to apply for the Community Challenge.
“StriveTogether launched the Cradle to Career Community Challenge because we refuse to settle for a world in which a child’s ability to thrive is dictated by factors like race or income,” StriveTogether President and CEO Jennifer Blatz said. “From partners across the country, we know the urgency of this work and the value of creating lasting change in communities. We are proud to start this year supporting 21 cradle-to-career partnerships to get real results for youth and families.”
StriveTogether is a national nonprofit working to bring communities together around data to make decisions and improve results for kids.
The Forsyth Promise is a member of the StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network, a national movement with a clear purpose: help every child in school and in life from cradle to career, regardless of race, zip code or circumstance. The Cradle to Career Network involves 10,800 organizations in 30 states and Washington D.C. Visit www.StriveTogether.org.
The Cradle to Career Community Challenge is a grant program by StriveTogether that seeks to create local change to enable economic mobility. The goal is to strengthen and align the many systems, such as education, employment, health and housing, that shape opportunity for children and families in America.