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No one disputes the powerful role that schools play in children’s lives. But schools shouldn’t go it alone in eliminating poverty and inequity in America.

Recent years have witnessed a surge of interest in efforts to create much stronger ties between schools and other providers of services for children. The Harlem Children’s Zone has captured the nation’s attention for its “cradle to career” focus on children’s well being. President Obama has pledged to support similar models to bring schools and communities together around the needs of young people.

One such model is Ready by 21, an effort to build community partnerships that support children from birth to adulthood, in school and out of school. The goal of this initiative? Prepare young people for college, work and life by the age of 21.

We recently spoke with three people who gave us a closer look at this project. Dan Domenech is the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, a member of the Ready by 21 ® National Partnership. Shelley Berman is superintendent of Kentucky’s Jefferson County Public Schools (Louisville), which recently began a Ready by 21 effort to enhance its longstanding work to strengthen relationships between schools and communities. Rob Schamberg implemented a Ready by 21 effort when he was superintendent of California’s Black Oak Mine Unified School District. He is now an executive with the Forum for Youth Investment, which is the lead national partner in the Ready by 21 approach.

All three delivered a common message: As local budgets shrink and youth investments dry up, better coordination of local resources has become more important than ever.

What Exactly is Ready by 21?

Domenech described it well:

[Ready by 21] is a community-based approach that recognizes that, as important as the schools are—and as important as an education is—they are not the only elements ... of the ability of the child to succeed. There are other very significant factors, such as the ability of a family to have proper healthcare and live in an environment that is conducive for a child to learn. Nutrition, childcare, early childhood education…. Ready by 21 recognizes that all of these factors must come together in allowing a child to succeed. It attempts to bring all of these agencies and organizations together within a community to ensure that these things are happening in a coordinated and cooperative way.

It is no accident that Domenech describes Ready by 21 as an “approach” rather than a program. If anything, it aims to create order out of the chaos of disparate programs that operate in so many communities. (The state of federal programs for children is apparently not much better.) Berman put it this way:

In some situations a child may be served by four or five different organizations or agencies, and they may not know that they are serving that child. … [Ready by 21] is a framework that we can use to guide our work in collaborating with community organizations and governmental agencies so that we produce the best results and outcomes for students.

For Domenech, schools are too often isolated fragments within an incoherent system:

The problem is the system, where we have silos that go up, where the schools say, “This is the school. And this is where you stop. Don’t come any further. We will take care of the child's education, and if you want to do your thing then wait until the child is out. Then you go ahead and do whatever you want.”

Ready by 21 addresses this “silo” problem head-on. “It is that piece of setting those large [community] goals,” Schamberg told us, “of creating the big tent, of using big strategies where we are all working towards the same mission.”

This brand of coordination has become critical as local resources run dry in the Great Recession. “With diminished resources,” Domenech said, “now more than ever it is important to make sure that the resources that are available are coordinated and brought to bear on the needs of each child.” Berman offered a similar perspective from Louisville:

The community has programs that we do not really coordinate as well as we could, thereby not having the kind of efficiency of resources that we might otherwise have. In addition, I think by collaborating we actually can acquire other foundation and federal resources that may not otherwise be accessible. For example, we are in the process of putting together the data for a Promised Neighborhood grant. We have put forward a Hope VI grant … It is that kind of work that you can do collaboratively to both enhance efficiency and to acquire additional resources.

How Does Ready by 21 Work?

Ready by 21 efforts often begin with a hard look in the mirror and a commitment to collaboration. Community leaders come together to ask themselves tough questions: How well are our young people doing? Are we doing all we can—together—to meet this need?

In Louisville, leaders took a careful look at the “safety net” for children: “The report came back saying we had some significant gaps—gaps in health, gaps in housing, and gaps in services in various places, particularly youth services, afterschool programs,” Berman said.

In Black Oak, stakeholders from across the community cam together to assess how ready their youth were for college, work and life. They used what they called a “red-yellow-green” chart to do this work. Schamberg described the chart this way:

[Down] one side of the chart are aspects of being ready for college, being ready for work, being ready for life. And across the top are age ranges. When we looked at the age 19 to 24 column, it was half green and half red in all categories. The green represented youth who went off to college. They were doing well. The reds were a combination of those who had stayed in the community and were probably unemployed or going to a community college, because what we have found … is that the staying power at community colleges is really low. So [this] chart was a very communicative chart for our school district and our community. One of the things that came out of it was a big increase in interest from our faith community. They said, “That is the same group of youth that we are very concerned about.”

Not only did the chart shine a light on areas of need, it helped create a shared sense of the community’s major goals and aspirations. It is one of many tools the national Ready by 21 Partnership offers leaders who want to build stronger local partnerships.

Another tool, a “stakeholder wheel,” allows Ready by 21 participants to assess the breadth of their partnership. In the Black Oak Mine Unified School District, for example, attendees at early meetings used colored dots to identify what areas they represented—education, parks and recreation, the faith community, the student community, or others. What resulted from that process was a vivid map of who was at the table and who was missing. That tool made it all the easier to see where partners still had to reach out.

Schamberg told us about other tools Ready by 21 partners can use: tools to promote better discussion among leaders, tools for helping communities understand the state of their youth, and tools for gauging the progress of a community’s shared efforts. Communities that choose to embark on a Ready by 21 effort will not lack for help.

Who Can Use Ready by 21?

Ready by 21 is no one-size-fits-all approach. In fact, the two districts we examined used it in entirely different ways. One is using it to make pre-existing community efforts more efficient and comprehensive. The other, to rally the community around new strategies for supporting the needs of youth. The only requirement: A community that is committed to working together to improve the lives of young people.

Collaboration Without Coordination in Louisville
Louisville schools are in many ways lucky. According to Superintendent Berman, the city has “an extraordinary mayor by the name of Jerry Abramson, who…sees education as key to the future of the community. So he has always invested in, and supported work in, education.” The challenge, then, is to do a better job of coordinating existing resources and filling in gaps.

Thanks in large part to the leadership of the mayor and his education policy advisor Mary Gwen Wheeler, there are a number of school/community partnerships in the city. The “Louisville Education and Employment Partnership” coaches students who are at risk through high school and into postsecondary education. The city has “Neighborhood Places,” one-stop community-based service centers where residents have access to health, education, employment and human services. There are also 95 Family Resource Youth Service Centers in the schools, where school-based staff work to solve non-academic problems that undermine students’ academic performance. The community’s “Everyone Reads” initiative puts about 4000 trained volunteers into schools every year to read to or with students.

Each of these programs is invaluable. But as Berman explained, community leaders have to figure out how they relate to one another and what youth needs they leave unaddressed:

We are just at the beginning phases of Ready by 21 in terms of doing a capacity audit. It will essentially map our resources, map the services we provide and give us a sense of where are the gaps and how could we better coordinate our efforts. So we are at that initial stage of looking at an audit and being able to take that information, synthesize it and create a plan. …

It is that kind of work that Ready by 21 can do … It is a way to say, how do all these services coordinate with each other so that we can create that safety net? And not only the safety net, but a support structure that launches youth and young people into a positive future.

Bringing Together Resources in the Black Oak Mine Unified School District
The Black Oak Mine Unified School District serves a community very different from Louisville. Spreading over 400 square miles and encompassing seven small towns, this area—the Georgetown Divide—is nestled between two rivers and accessible only through a deep canyon.

Such a remote place had little county or state support for its young people. It was difficult enough to get a sheriff out there, let alone counseling services or afterschool programs. But when Schamberg entered the district as superintendent, he saw the potential of the Ready by 21 approach to make big changes. And he jumped at the opportunity to be a pilot district for the project.

To start, district officials held a two-day conference where 100 attendees representing the county government, regional universities, community-based organizations, schools, parents and students convened to adopt a vision, develop work groups and form a steering committee. Now, several years later, the students of Black Oak Mine Unified have access to services they never had before. Some of the earliest successes included strong partnerships with a law enforcement agency and two community-based counseling agencies from the county seat. How did the community bring in new partners? They gave them office space in the district and made them feel very, very welcome as a part of the staff.

What you'll see, if you talk to nearly any school district … is that there is often a complaint by school administrators that “There are too many people from the outside who want us to do their thing.” And what you hear from the outside is, “We have to bang down the doors of that school district because they have got the kids and we want to help.” … What we were able to build was a culture of cooperation.

In tough economic times, different organizations have come together to support not only young people. They support each other in ways that benefit young people. When money is tight as it is now, especially in a community that historically had so little, this give and take is truly remarkable.

We looked at essentially what was good for kids, but also what was good for each of the organizations, so that we were not competing. I am very proud that we got to a point with a number of organizations where we would basically co-write grants. And we would say, “How does your funding look this year? We will pay for that.” And then when our funding was not so good that they paid for it. So we had continuity of services. … There was a lot of intention in what we did to put together a quality youth development focus in our schools and in our community.

How to get Involved

We all get preoccupied with our own work and sometimes it is hard to stop and say, ‘Let’s take the time to collaborate so that we can do this more efficiently.’ There is a natural tension to become absorbed in one's work, in one's program. And the other tendency is that you have a problem and you create a program to address the problem. We have to rethink that approach, and the approach really has to be, how we currently addressing that problem? Who is, what resources can we realign or bring to bear on that problem that already exists? – Shelley Berman

To get your district or community involved, you can approach any of the national partners in the process—the American Association of School Administrators (Bryan Joffe, bjoffe@aasa.org), United Way Worldwide, Corporate Voices for Working Families, the National Collaboration for Youth, the Search Institute and the National Conference of State Legislatures—or the lead agency, the Forum for Youth Investment (Ian Faigley, ian@forumfyi.org). And all of the partner organizations have information and tools available on their websites so that you can readily find out more about the national Ready by 21 partnership.