Dear Friends,
We have exciting news to share! RTFA has secured $1.55M in funding to strengthen and support our focus and commitment to the Whole Child. A child’s overall well-being is influenced by a wide range of people, experiences and systems that support their growth and development, including education, health, and human services. Our commitment to improving educational outcomes for Rochester’s children will now be expanded to engage new partners in different ways to support the Whole Child, pre-natal to age 8.
This success is due to the hard work of many individuals, including parents and organizational partners, who over the course of the last 12 months, dedicated countless hours — sharing ideas and subject matter expertise, writing, reviewing drafts, editing, etc.— to develop and submit a successful proposal. Although there are too many to mention here individually (about 3 dozen from start to submission), we’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the contributions of our parent leaders, Toyin Anderson, Tina Carney, Simone Clarke and Cherriese Buffis. We are incredibly grateful to each of you!
This will be a big part of our upcoming two-day ROC the Future Alliance Retreat, on May 11th and 16th: Aligning for Change. This retreat will provide an important opportunity for RTFA’s key thought partners and community leaders to align our work and commitment to racial equity, parent leadership and systems change, and to create a foundation for the Whole Child. Please look for updates of the Whole Child Initiative in future editions and on our website.
On top of this, we held our first Collective Impact Youth Summit, with more than 50 youth and adults working together at the Rochester Museum and Science Center on March 12.
Please read about this, and the other exciting work of our alliance and our community partners in the newsletter. None of this would be possible without the time and commitment you dedicate to this collective impact work. The TOGETHER work of ROC the Future is the doing and being for Rochester’s children.
We are all in this TOGETHER…
For the Children!