increasing youth opportunities

updates

The Engaging Families Initiative (continued)

The Wallace Foundation supported EFI over the past four years, as one of four national Parents and Communities for Kids (PACK) initiatives, which are designed to improve learning outcomes for children ages six to ten through activities outside the traditional school day. The initiative worked closely with nine Boston-based after-school providers that primarily served Black and Latino students. During the four-year grant, BOSTnet served as EFI’s project manager and provided technical assistance, training and linkages to community resources. An underlying assumption of the initiative has been that children learn not only as result of significant contributions of schools, but also of families, after-school programs, and other community supports.

Although there were many lessons learned from EFI, the overarching lesson from the Boston PACK has been that implementing effective parental engagement strategies requires an average of two years and sustained technical assistance and other resources. With regard to indicators of quality, the EFI-participating programs exceeded statewide averages in parent engagement compared to other after-school programs in the Massachusetts Afterschool Research Study (MARS).

EFI was a powerful tool in helping us understand and utilize lessons learned from the initiative by providing training and technical assistance to other after-school programs in our portfolio of agencies providing out-of-school time programming throughout Greater Boston. We hope to create a small pilot in the near future to operationalize the lesson learned as a means of assisting programs to support youth’s social-emotional wellbeing.

For more information to access a best practices manual, please visit: uwmb.org/ourwork/youth