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A recent story on NPR’s All Things Considered caught our attention for two reasons. First, it opened with a report from a coffee bar in Willamette High School in Eugene, Oregon.  (Seriously, a coffee bar inside a high school? How cool is that?) Second – and much more importantly – it made the point that whether college is in the cards for students or not, schools can and should do a better job at preparing high school graduates for the world of work.

At the Willamette coffee bar, students learn how to work a cash register, handle money, juggle multiple orders, adhere to food safety and quality standards, and provide quality customer service. These are all the “soft skills” that more and more employers expect, according to the report.

“Roughly seven out of 10 high school grads are headed to college every year — but that leaves hundreds of thousands who aren’t. And survey after survey shows that employers are demanding — even of college-bound students — some level of job skills and professionalism: punctuality, customer service, managing people and teamwork,” says reporter Claudio Sanchez.

The story highlights the school alliance with DECA (Distributive Education Clubs of America) a program that has exposed high schoolers to real-world work skills since the 1940s. It covers multiple industries, from manufacturing to etail sales to entrepreneurship to graphic design – all of which supply skills students can eventually apply to careers, whether they attend college or not.

Given the rising cost of higher education and the blossoming number of careers that rely on more technical skills, wouldn’t it make sense to prepare students for college and career instead of one of the other?

Advocacy and Communication Solutions, LLC (ACS) is proud to partner with Corporation for a Skilled Workforce (CSW), which catalyzes nationwide transformative change in education, economic, and workforce development through research and action. Learn more about ACS workforce clients here.

“I have not time to mince words nor to sugarcoat the truth.  Truth is truth and the truth is that many Americans do not see value in investing in boys of color.” 

These words from Nikkia Rowe, principal of Renaissance Academy High School in Baltimore, were published by The Washington Post on June 25^th, and they reflect what we see as a building sense of awareness and frustration among those who do indeed care – and care deeply – about the plight of boys and young men of color in our nation.

Rowe, who obviously does not mince words, points directly to antiquated systems as key factors in keeping boys and young men of color from achieving their potential.

“There are schools all over the country fighting, just like Renaissance, to save the lives of children that society has consistently undervalued, hidden, and avoided…” she writes. “[This] devastating hardship and struggle is the creation of those who control systems. Outcomes for young men of color will only truly change when we all have the courage to make radical change to challenge and restructure the current systems.”

The potential of every newborn black male is shaped by compounding factors of societal complacency, antiquated systems, and lack of investment, Rowe explains. She calls upon city and state leaders to make key changes, starting with deep and intentional investment in the population she serves:

“We have a choice. We can invest on the front end in quality educational experiences, college access, and employment and career pathways, or we shall certainly pay on the back end with our children’s loss of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

At Advocacy & Communication Solutions, LLC (ACS), we couldn’t agree more. We encourage everyone to read the full post, and consider how your work can support boys and young men of color in your community. For our part, we pledge to continue to make this a key area of focus and help build knowledge about needs and solutions. Visit our website to see other news posts about boys and young men of color, a case study about how ACS helped five communities strategically communicate and organize for action, and research about the 10 key elements for successful efforts to raise the bar for boys and young men of color.

Harvard economist Ron Ferguson says, if you want to understand why black male students lag behind white ones in our nation’s schools, you should ask them. A recent NPR story, “What Young Men of Color Can Teach Us About The Achievement Gap,” contains an interview with Ferguson in which he explains the findings of his latest report, Aiming Higher Together: Strategizing Better Outcomes for Boys and Young Men of Color.

Boys and young men of color often enter an education system where the deck is stacked against them. They come into kindergarten behind their peers, and gradually learn from peers that they are expected to behave and achieve differently from other students. Even teachers can reinforce lower expectations in terms of achievement and behavior. There are also conditions in homes and communities that attribute to both the preparedness level of boys entering school and the expectations for them as they grow.

Instead, says Ferguson, we should work to create a better person-environment fit between boys and young men of color and the schools they attend, and work to foster conditions in homes and communities that help enable rather than stifle boys and young men of color.

Advocacy & Communication Solutions, LLC (ACS) continues to highlight issues that boys and young men of color face on a daily basis. Visit our website to see other news posts about boys and young men of color, a case study about how ACS helped five communities strategically communicate and organize for action, and research about the 10 key elements for successful efforts to raise the bar for boys and young men of color.

The third edition of “The 50 State Project” by Congressional Quarterly/Roll Call was issued in April. This report reviews the tens of thousands of bills passed by state lawmakers during each session and examines trends across the country and what drives a bill to receive the most attention.

The report found trends in these 10 areas:

1. Budget
2. Education
3. Healthcare
4. Energy/Environment
5. Transportation
6. Economy
7. Elections
8. Prisons
9. Taxes
10. Drugs

As the most recent sessions of state legislatures came to a close, budget and tax issues continued to remain the top priority in 13 states. California, Minnesota and Tennessee are focused on spending budget surpluses; while other states, including Alabama and Louisiana, are recording large deficits and looking for ways to turn their state budgets around.

Other notable budget highlights include:

• While Alaska will close the year at a $3.8 Billion deficit, its large cash reserve means it is likely not to see any negative backlash.
• Arizona was able to lower the tax rate as was promised by the state’s newest governor, Doug Ducey.
• In lieu of a tax hike, Connecticut is reviewing the approval of a $500 million reduction in state spending that includes workforce reduction and cuts to the state’s social safety net.
• With no agreement between parties, Illinois still stands without a budget for 2016.
• The best case scenario for Kansas’ fiscal year, ending June 30, is a $50 million deficit. The state is looking to make cuts to agency spending including highway projects and delaying payments to the state’s pension program.
• North Dakota experienced a $1 billion shortfall in the budget cycle ending this February. The Governor made a 4.05% cut to all agencies receiving state funding.
• Oklahoma’s $1.3 billion deficit has forced two sets of spending cuts across all agencies, three percent in December 2015 and four percent in March 2016.
• After an 8-month budget impasse, it still remains unknown whether or not Pennsylvania will raise or lower their tax rates.
• Falling energy prices mean a $145 million budget deficit for West Virginia.

Education remains an important topic of discussion in many states. Of all important issues identified in the 50 states, 10 percent were centered around education. Colorado has some of the lowest per student funding in the country, dropping well below the line legally allowed by the federal government. Massachusetts has some of the best schools in the nation, but there is a continued disparity between wealthy and low-income areas.

Other notable education highlights include:

• In Arizona the state’s school system was illegally underfunded for several years.  After a lengthy legal battle, the state has been ordered to pay $3.5 billion in restitution.
• Georgia is looking to cut –back its state sponsored HOPE scholarship program as demand continues to exceed the dollars designated.
• Idaho’s legislature has approved a 7.4 percent increase in funding for the state’s education system.
• A tough sell to Iowa’s legislature, Governor Terry Branstad reallocated tax dollars allocated for school infrastructure project to water quality control projects.
• In Kentucky¸ Democratic leaders continue to clash with the Governor over a proposal to provide scholarships to students attending community and technical colleges.
• Louisiana continues to rank one of the worst states for K-12 public education in the country. A 40 percent cut to all higher education budget since 2008 does not help and students are being expected to pay 65 percent more than the 2008 tuition rate.  As a result, many students are leaving the state, causing an inability to meet workforce demands in many high-demand fields.
• Now the ninth largest state, North Carolina continues to struggle with education issues because state spending lags greatly behind the state’s growth, and re-segregation of school continues to cause disparity issues.
• Pennsylvania continues to see a need for more money to be put into public schools. Much of the public school costs are put on the individual districts; thus wealthier areas are still succeeding academically but poorer areas have seen class sizes balloon and cuts to staff such as nurses and guidance counselors.
• In Ohio, the pendulum continues to swing on the use of state testing to track results and accountability. Ohio’s one-year experiment with the PARCC tests ended after complaints across the state. Meanwhile, officials are waiting to see if new charter school oversight laws improve performance. More recently, questions have arisen about attendance at online schools.
• South Dakota lawmakers approved a half-cent raise to boost teacher pay, which is currently the lowest in the nation.
• Tennessee Governor Bill Haslam has included education improvements in his school agenda. These include pay raises for teachers, additional dollars toward school maintenance projects, and additional dollars toward getting students to obtain a college degree.
• Washington’s underfunding of schools was reviewed by the Supreme Court, and the state must come up with a plan to fully fund schools by 2018 lest they be given a $100,000 per day fine.
• Michigan’s unemployment rate is now below 5 percent, which is considered a solid number by The 50 State project. Despite that number, the economy is still under scrutiny because of the state’s heavy reliance on manufacturing.
• The state Supreme Court in South Carolina ruled in November 2014 that the General Assembly had not done its job to ensure all students received a basic education, and gave policymakers until the end of their session to address the issue.  Bills were working their way through the legislature but reforms had yet to become law.
• In New York, Governor Cuomo proposed a program that would grant 12 weeks of paid family leave, which would be the most generous leave policy in the country.  Senate Republicans are resisting this proposal.
• Wisconsin’s roads are the fourth worst in the nation, and lawmakers have been lacking in a long-term solution to fix the problem.  Options currently under consideration include raising the gas tax, upping vehicle registration fees, and implementing a toll system.

A final major trend uncovered in this report is the rising opioid abuse in at least seven states. Pennsylvania has made prevention of abuse a top priority, and Maryland, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, Massachusetts and Maine are all working to develop public awareness campaigns to empower law enforcement to combat the issue. West Virginia is being hit the hardest by the opioid crisis and continues to face high death rates, stiff hospital costs, and increased crime.

Advocacy & Communication Solutions, LLC is proud to partner with organizations committed to improving outcomes for our early childhood education, workforce development, K-12 education, health and human services system, and Medicaid.  Learn more about ACS’ clients here.

The Center for Community Solutions, a non-profit and non-partisan think tank based in Cleveland Ohio, released Human Services 101: A Straightforward Guide to the Social Services in Ohio in June 2016.  This guide provides comprehensive and easy to understand information on social service systems (such as employment and literacy, health care, food assistance, children’s services, and others) that support Ohioans, and details the impact of social services on many communities in Ohio.

Income support services that provide cash assistance to families in need, such as Temporary Assistance for Need Families (TANF), is just one of the several social services available to children and families across the country. The impact of social services often goes unnoticed or misunderstood. The services explored in this guide support children, women, job seekers, the disabled, the elderly and many more.  By describing the wide impact of social services on Ohio’s communities, this guide illustrates how social services affect all Ohioans by proving that they are a critical component to the stability and success of Ohio’s families.

Advocacy & Communication Solutions, LLC (ACS) is a proud partner to organizations that support social services, such as A Place 4 Me, a initiative to end youth homelessness in Cuyahoga County Ohio; the City of Little Rock Arkansas, which is now implementing their Master Plan for Children, Youth, and Families; and the Wisconsin Alliance for Infant Mental Health, which builds professional capacity and partnerships that support policies which are in the best interest of infants, young children and their families. We understand how social services impact our communities and families, and work to strengthen that impact through our clients and partners.

In a multi-pronged effort designed and deployed by Advocacy & Communication Solutions, LLC (ACS), PRE4CLE and partners throughout the state have urged Ohio Governor John Kasich, to reverse a decision that prevents the strategic use of child care funding streams. This effort in building awareness around this issue has resulted in a Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial calling on the Governor to reverse the decision. Saturday’s Plain Dealer editorial states, “Combined state and federal funding ensures that poor children can attend facilities with high ratings, places where they can learn more and grow. It’s a model that wasn’t broken until the state intervened.”

You can read the rest of the editorial here:

http://www.cleveland.com/opinion/index.ssf/2016/08/ohio_officials_ought_to_change.html

PRE4CLE is a comprehensive plan to ensure all 3- and 4-year old children in Cleveland have access to high-quality preschool by increasing the number of quality preschools in Cleveland; helping preschool providers improve their quality ratings; and connecting families to quality preschool programs.

Does this sound familiar? You create an eNewsletter, send it to your mailing list, hoping for a 25% open rate. Then, you post it on social media as a way to reach other audiences. Could you be doing more to marry these two channels to further your communication strategies? Chances are you could be.

Just remember: Social media and newsletters are effective tactics to complement your communication strategies. If you need help with honing your communication strategy, consider checking out Advocacy & Communication Solutions (ACS) tools: 10 Tips for an Effective Communication Approach or pointers to Leverage Social Media.

A recent article, “Newsletters and Social Media Aren’t the Same- So Why Do So Many Marketers Treat Them That Way?, offers suggestions on how to make newsletter content and social media work hand-in-hand. Below are some highlights:

Pay to reach the hard-to-engage: Many social platforms including Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn give you the ability to upload subscriber lists and target those specific individuals. You can target content to all of your eNewsletter subscribers or to the segment that has not opened a particular article. If you want to grow the size of your subscriber list, you can upload the same subscriber list and have Facebook create a “lookalike” list that shares characteristics and target these individuals with paid content.

Create Complementary Social Content: Don’t expect the same piece of newsletter content to be pulled verbatim and work well in social media.  When it comes to social, the audience expects content to be visual and engaging. Pull out an interesting quote from a newsletter article and create it into a visual graphic to share on your social media channels. Have an article filled with statistics? Pull them out and create a graphic for your social audience to react to!

Spotlight Social Sharing Opportunities: You can utilize high-performing social media content to feed your newsletter. Have a post that was particularly well received? Pull it out and put it in your newsletter! Encourage your readers to share on their own social media channels.

Reach your audiences most effectively by thinking through your communication strategies first, taking into account your purpose, target audiences, and core messages. Use the tips above to allow your target audiences the ability to engage with your content in different ways across multiple platforms. Please feel free to contact us anytime to discuss how ACS can help you with your communication!

In the non-profit, philanthropic, and government sectors, it is easy become engrossed in industry jargon.  Organizations and individuals in these fields understand one another when using jargon and there is comfort in this ‘short hand’ manner of communication.  What Advocacy & Communication Solutions (ACS) has seen over the years, however, is that those habits of using jargon internally among colleagues are rarely jettisoned when it comes to communicating to the outside world.  As a result, many organizations fall flat in their ability to clearly and effectively communicate even about simple concepts and issues.  “The Chronicle of Philanthropy” recently asked readers to share the jargon that bothered them most and the highlights are below. If some of these terms are familiar then take a shot at filling out the ACS’ tool to help you give jargon the boot in your daily communication. ACS has been told this is one of the toughest but most productive tools to help sharpen your communication skills and hone your message – without industry jargon.

 

A new documentary streaming on Netflix called The Beginning of Life focuses on the complex lives of babies and seeks to dispel the myth that babies are “empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge of the world around them.”

In fact, three decades of research by leading scientists suggests this is “patently untrue,” according to an article about the documentary in The Atlantic. “If more people recognized that fact, the way communities and policymakers think about and invest in the early years of life might be different,” the article says.

The documentary interviews several experts in the field of early childhood development, and the findings echo what many in the early childhood community – including some of Advocacy & Communication Solutions’ clients –  have been saying for years. Key takeaways from the article include:

• The first five years matter. Kids who spend the early years in loving and enriching environments are more likely to stay in school and become productive adults. They are likely to be healthier. But when babies don’t have adults who engage with them, pathways in the brain that form a child’s foundation can disintegrate.
• Learning happens through play. Helping children thrive doesn’t mean providing the best toys or the most expensive gadgets. Learning happens when children create their own play worlds. A child who sees a ruler and a pen and turns them into an airplane is often using more of her imagination and stimulating more of her brain than a child who is handed an already-put-together toy, according to Jack Shonkoff, the director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University.
• Self-esteem is important. Children with high self-esteem who feel loved and supported are willing to try new things and to fail a lot in the process, said Andrew Meltzoff, co-director at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, because they know they’ll be safe. Even preschoolers who shout “no” at tired parents are testing the supportive boundaries of their environments.
• Strong parent-child relationships are critical. The documentary points out that parents who are able to cultivate strong relationships with their children are ultimately helping shape more productive adults. “That love is an important part of the economy,” said the economist James Heckman.

For more than a decade, Advocacy & Communication Solutions, LLC (ACS) has been enmeshed in the creation of early childhood learning systems in states, such as First Things First in Arizona, and in cities, such as Cleveland’s nationally recognized PRE4CLE and many other early childhood efforts across the country.  ACS continues to work in local communities, with state government, national non-profits, and thoughts leaders across the country to encourage a holistic approach to helping our nation’s young children get the best start in life through early childhood programs and policies which address health, nutrition, parent support, social services, as well as high-quality preschool. Learn more about ACS’s successes with First Things First and PRE4CLE here: www.advocacyandcommunication.org/clients

After Advocacy & Communication Solutions, LLC, (ACS) successfully presented Little Rock’s Master Plan for Children, Youth, and Families to the city’s Board of Directors on June 7^th, the 9 city board members unanimously approved the plan. Following this initial approval by the Board of Directors, formal approval in the form of a resolution was passed on June 21th, 2016. The resolution allows for the implementation of the Master Plan, starting immediately.

The Master Plan sets out to create safer and healthier communities for families, and increase educational, employment and wellness opportunities for children and youth.

The three-year Master Plan will serve as a framework for the city to implement the following goals that lay the foundation for city programs and services for the next 10 years:

1. Use data to prioritize programs and services (such as academic assistance, job training, mentorship, counseling, and substance abuse treatment) and work with partners across the city to fulfill unmet needs such as housing and food assistance;
2. Create a set of standards that will increase program quality for children youth and families and create benchmarks and indicators that ensure accountability;
3. Create a plan to increase communication with the community;
4. Fund additional programs that provide employment skills; and
5. Integrate greater youth participation in the decision-making.

ACS was honored to be part of the Master Plan process for the past 16 months, convening and working with local stakeholders in the city to help develop this critical plan for the youth of Little Rock.

Learn more about the Little Rock Youth Master Plan here.