Innovative Partnerships
The Innovative Partnerships initiative supports and documents for potential replication “bright spots” of innovative partnerships improving access to high quality early education/preschool for at-risk children, readying children, families, and schools for kindergarten success.
First launched in 2015, VECF offered a second competitive grant opportunity during the summer of 2016 to promote the fostering of local innovations in Smart Beginnings communities.
In the 2016-17 round of competition, four Innovative Partnership Grants were awarded with a new twist this year: the four grantees will work together in a coordinated collaboration to ensure the sharing and replication of data innovations across the four regions as part of their grant-funded activities. The specific goal or barrier being addressed and the relevant innovative solution for each of the four grantees are outlined below:
Smart Beginnings Greater Roanoke
- Issue Being Addressed: Assuring quality early care and education services for at-risk children that increase their school readiness; efficient and effective use of quality improvement resources for targeted results
- Innovative Solution: Expand scope and scale of data tracking, analysis, and synthesis from child care settings to school division classrooms to intentionally inform quality improvement and resource investment decisions in participating child care centers and programs
Smart Beginnings Greater Richmond
- Issue Being Addressed: Overcoming barriers to expansion of Virginia Quality to improve quality of early care and education
- Innovative Solution: Improve alignment between public and private early care and education programs by building opportunities for shared data and analysis across sectors, thereby providing information, connections, and structures needed for Virginia Quality expansion
Smart Beginnings Thomas Jefferson Area
- Issue Being Addressed: Assuring that low-income children have access to early childhood experiences that support school readiness and reducing data fragmentation across diverse and varied early childhood service sectors
- Innovative Solution: Establish a cross-jurisdictional system for gathering and sharing data across public and private early childhood service partners
Smart Beginnings Southeast
- Issue Being Addressed: Upskilling the early childhood workforce in rural, low income communities and reducing challenges to access to community college coursework while also assuring a supportive learning environment for non-traditional students
- Innovative Solution: Partnership with John Tyler Community College to expand availability of off-campus classes and implement a cohort model support system for students for whom the distance to a college campus offering early childhood coursework is a barrier to access