The Whole Child Initiative is here!
Our first year of this initiative is a planning year, and that’s exactly what we’ve been doing! Each week, the Core Team meets to plan our launch, and get to work on the implementation. But what exactly does that mean?
The Whole Child Initiative (WCI) is unlike anything we’ve done before, and it will have a transformative impact on all of ROC the Future. To be sure, we’ve been moving in this direction for a long time, as this work is built on the sustained work and effort of the School Readiness Outcome Team, and the burgeoning work of the Early Grade Literacy Outcome Team. We are being super intentional about this work being grounded in racial equity and we’re including parents and family members as partners in decision-making at the very beginning. We intend to change the systems so that they work better for children, prenatal through age 8, and their families. This means going far together, which really means sharing power with parents by being intentional with everything, every meeting and every decision.
The Core Team of 16 (including 6 parents) meets weekly to begin setting the infrastructure and planning the launch. For right now, we’re tackling defining and establishing a distributed leadership model, defining family partnership and ensuring parents are co-partners for each subcommittee, hiring, and onboarding and training, and identifying our process metrics and benchmarks for this planning year.
We’ve also finalized the job description for the Whole Child Director, and recruitment will begin immediately! Additional fulltime and parttime positions are being finalized with prioritized hiring starting in July. Please check our website frequently for updated hiring opportunities and stay tuned for additional updates in our summer edition of the newsletter!