Together, we can create lasting change for Chicago's future. Make your gift today.
Together, we can create lasting change for Chicago's future. Make your gift today.
PROGRAM INNOVATION
We honor the legacy of our founders by striving to build a just and equitable society in which the Center, in partnership with families, is a beacon of best practices, innovation, and impact. We are proud of our reputation for program excellence, and we are equally proud of the role that we play in promoting cross-sector collaboration, thought leadership, and systems change. Doing this—and doing this well—takes resources. We rely on government funding to sustain our core programming, but these public funds are not flexible enough to allow us to readily adapt to challenges and opportunities as they emerge.
Therefore, in connection with our Invest Today, Empower Tomorrow campaign, it is our goal to raise $2.5 million to establish the Carole Robertson Center for Learning Innovation Fund. This will ensure that we can continue to invest in new ideas that benefit our organization and our field as a whole.
OUR INNOVATION VALUES
Human
We emphasize human-centered design that puts the people most impacted at the center of the design process. This ensures that what is developed is vetted, relevant, and has the buy-in of the families we serve and the staff we support.
Responsiveness
We stay nimble. As soon as we recognize a challenge or opportunity, we use the information and resources at hand to design an innovation in response – perhaps a new strategy to make programming more effective, or to expand or scale a program or service beyond its current application, or to address a vexing issue that impacts our sector. Having an Innovation Fund will allow us to readily invest in a promising idea without having to wait many months for a new funding cycle.
Resilience
We believe in failing fast. We are willing to take risks, and ready to tailor the innovation if it doesn’t lead to the intended outcome. We iterate and iterate again.
Collaboration
We are collaborative. We co-create innovations with our partners, working together to test, scale, and disseminate new knowledge and approaches.
INNOVATION PRESENT AND FUTURE
Recently, we have developed these innovative initiatives:
TransformED
We identify community members, often caregivers of children enrolled in our programs, who want to be trained and credentialed in early childhood education. This model creates sustainable career paths and economic mobility in our communities, while addressing the severe shortage of early childhood educators.
BASES-K
Bridging Academic and Social Emotional Supports into Kindergarten (BASES-K) uses a whole child, systems approach to kindergarten readiness by building partnerships among the three pillars that support a child: their family, their local school, and their early learning and after-school provider (the Center). This has been integrated across our center-based early childhood education programming.
With your donation to our Innovation Fund, we plan to:
- Provide deeper and more intentional wrap-around mental and behavioral health support for youth and families
- Integrate BASES-K practices into our other program delivery models
- Expand our out-of-school-time academic and enrichment opportunities
- Grow and strengthen our community-based advocacy work
- Increase our support of the Family Child Care Network
Your support will ensure that we can continue to invest in impactful community- and research-driven innovations as soon as the need or opportunity arises. This is essential if we are to excel in our mission to educate, enrich, and empower children and families in the most marginalized communities in Chicago, and achieve our ambitious vision of building a just and equitable society.
