Norfolk Foundation

Winner of the 2009 Effies Community Leadership Award for effectively leading its community in implementing initiatives that address a pressing community opportunity or problem

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The Norfolk Foundation

Contact: Christine Morris [cmorris@norfolkfoundation.org]

In 2004 The Norfolk Foundation helped create Smart Beginnings South Hampton Roads using the foundation’s grant dollars, board leadership and staff support. So far we have invested $10 million in grants for this initiative, which works to ensure that all children in the South Hampton Roads region of Virginia start kindergarten ready to succeed in school and in life.

Each year 14,500 children from Norfolk and surrounding cities enter public kindergartens. Evaluations show that at least 1 in 8 of them are not ready for school and need remedial help or to repeat the grade. This poor start can impact children the rest of their lives. In 2005 our region spent $20 million on remedial education for public school students not passing grades K-3. Falling behind at such young ages makes students likely to drop out of high school and be unemployed or work in menial jobs as adults.

To ensure that area children no longer have this fate, The Norfolk Foundation is focusing its resources on Smart Beginnings South Hampton Roads. Before launching this nonprofit we spent three years researching early education models, convening task forces and bringing in national speakers on early education issues to talk with community and political leaders. We identified a foundation donor with a major interest in improving youth opportunities and encouraged her investment in the initiative. One of our board members volunteered to chair Smart Beginnings, and a staff member has spent 50% of her time working on this initiative with support from 8 other foundation staff members.

Improving children’s early years was an issue that stalled in our region until our foundation became involved. We convened civic leaders, donors, foundation board members, local university presidents and business leaders. We brought early education experts from across the country to inform them about best practices. The result was Smart Beginnings – a grassroots organization that:

· educates area residents about the importance of the early years

· advocates for greater public and private investments in early childhood education

· encourages collaboration to improve the systems that serve area preschoolers.

Our first step was to convene a network of early childhood providers, which won a $500,000 state grant to begin work on improving our region’s preschool system. This included creating a professional development career plan for preschool teachers, an agreement that let childcare providers study three years at a community college and finish their degree at a local university, piloting a rating system for preschool providers that includes a quality improvement system and piloting a screening program for newborns that helps detect those with special needs. Supported by our $10 million in grant funds, these programs have been expanded regionally and are being replicated throughout Virginia

The success of this initiative rests with work being done today by dozens of task forces, committees and small groups that tackle specific projects. These include running a public awareness campaign, forging agreements between more community colleges and universities, creating kindergarten transition plans, expanding the preschool rating system and studying outcomes of children in quality programs.

Everything we have learned in the five years of developing Smart Beginnings is being shared with other Virginia communities through the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation, which The Norfolk Foundation helped create in 2007. Our region’s preschool quality improvement program, professional development career plan, universal newborn screening, college agreements and public awareness campaign are recognized as model programs in Virginia .

Because of our groundwork with Smart Beginnings, Virginia parents can look on the SmartBeginnings.org website and see the quality rating of preschools they are considering. This will help them make informed decisions about where their preschool children will thrive. In our region our grants are funding a study to determine if children enrolled in higher quality rated preschool programs perform better in kindergarten. Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine became an advocate for early education in 2003 after attending one of the foundation’s events that featured a national speaker on this topic. Now, the importance of improving early education is on the platforms of most statewide and Hampton Roads political candidates.

Our pathways to a successful preschool system include strengthening relations between parents, childcare providers and civic and political leaders. We also work to create effective networks that are working to change our system. By engaging community leaders in Smart Beginnings we are on our way to improving children’s opportunities for lifelong success.