Daily Archives: May 15, 2022

This is a game-changer!

Greenwood, Inc. has acquired private national club, The Gathering Spot, in a one-of-a-kind Black-owned business merger, Businesswire reports.

Greenwood, a digital banking platform for Black and Latino individuals and business owners, is expanding their footprint, recently acquiring The Gathering Spot (TGS), a national private membership network that caters to Black professionals. TGS has more than 12,000 members that span the industry, representing companies that include Apple, Goldman Sachs, Meta, NAACP, Revolt, Truist and Spotify. Alongside Greenwoods thousands of account holders with an onboarding waitlist in the hundreds of thousands, combined the two companies boast a community of more than 1 million people.

Both Greenwood and TGS share a mission of empowering minorities to financial freedom through community building and group economics. Already TGS offers its members a curated network of industry professionals, unique experiences, exclusive content, concierge services, and access to their flagship clubs in Atlanta, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, equipped with co-working spaces, meeting rooms, event space, a restaurant, and bar. The national club also has Connected City communities across the country in New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Charlotte, and Houston. Under the new merger, members will have even more perks including personal finance content and enhanced banking services.

The Gathering Spot prides itself on building an intentional community, one where we can celebrate each member and connect them to the resources and networks they need to build on their successes. Joining with Greenwood is a commitment to our community, and we share Greenwoods vision in empowering people and helping them to build opportunity and generational wealth, said Ryan Wilson, Co-founder and CEO of TGS.

Wilson will continue in his role at TGS while also serving as the new Chief Community Officer at Greenwood. TGS co-founder and COO TK Petersen will also continue in his duties and serve as the new Vice President at Greenwood. Petersen said the merger is a win-win for TGS members and will continue to bring new possibilitiesto the community.

This combination of Greenwood and The Gathering Spot provides immense benefits to the members and will unlock a full range from financial education to banking and financial tools. We are excited to bring these two communities together and continue to innovate and roll out combined products and offerings to our community, said Petersen.

The weight of this moment is not lost on either side, both realizing that this particular acquisition will have huge ripples in the culture, allowing Black and brown business leaders across the country to have true equity and inclusion in the financial sector.

Minorities continue to face a lack of financial inclusion and tools. Both Greenwood and The Gathering Spot have been leading conversations on access to capital and the power of minority financial inclusion. This moment marks a significant milestone for the culture and strength within the community. The combined efforts of Greenwood and The Gathering spot will expand the collective power of minorities to impact the wealth gap, said Greenwood co-founder and chairman, Ryan Glover.

The digital banking platform believes this acquisition is critical to creating a true community around wealth building in a way that hasnt been done before. With an array of business and cultural leaders at TGS, Greenwood will have access to a core network of individuals that have the potential to influence the masses.

The future of finance is community. The Black community has been a cultural leader for a long time. It makes sense that it now becomes more of a leader in business and in the future of finance. It is an important milestone to have two Black-owned companies on both sides of an M&A transaction. It brings new meaning to the term black-on-black, said Greenwood Board member Paul Judge.

To get more information on the Greenwood and The Gathering Spot community, visit http://www.BankGreenwood.com/TGS.

Photo Courtesy of Greenwood/The Gathering Spot

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Greenwood Acquires Private National Club The Gathering Spot In Black-Owned Business Merger - Because of Them We Can

OH DEAR III BY CARLOS GMEZ DE FRANCISCO/WWW.CARLOSGAMEZDEFRANCISCO.COM

Click here to download this article as it appears in the magazine, with accompanying artwork.

Editors note:This article is from the Spring 2022 issue of theNonprofit Quarterly, Going Pro-Black: What Would a Pro-Black Sector Sound, Look, Taste, and Feel Like?

Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyones head. They are fighting to win material benefits, to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children. National liberation, the struggle against colonialism, the construction of peace, progress and independence are hollow words devoid of any significance unless they can be translated into a real improvement of living conditions.

Amilcar Cabral1

Amilcar Cabral, Pan African leader of the Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde national independence struggle, wrote and spoke extensively about the need to fight for tangible, material changes for our communities. For Cabral, the wave of global independence movements by Africans and other (Western-titled) Third World peoples was always about returning power from imperialist and colonial forces to everyday people. Today, this aim for social change workers remains the same, if not more pronounced. Our work is always to build power, not engage in ideological debates that only advance a few.

At CompassPoint (CP), we define power as the capacity (which includes will, resources, time, access, and more) to shape the outcomes of ones circumstances. Our work has been on a six-year-long antiracist path that has led to power building rather than challenging anti-Blackness or building for diversity, equity, and inclusion.2 As an objective of our racial justice goals, we seek to grow power for our staff (and community) who are marginalized, with a focus on Black women. In February 2019, Building Movement Project released the report Race to Lead: Women of Color in the Nonprofit Sector, by senior research associate Ofronama Biu, which surveyed more than four thousand nonprofit staff (women of color made up 32 percent, about 1,280 respondents).3 It describes the all-too-familiar status quo:

Women of color described being passed over for opportunities for new jobs or promotions, often in favor of white and/or male candidates with fewer qualifications. They observed that men, particularly white men, tended to advance fastereven if they were underqualifiedand were given more professional development opportunities. They wrote that directors did not see women of color as leaders and withheld projects and advancement opportunities.4

The report yielded three major findings: (1) racial and gender biases create barriers to advancement for women of color; (2) education and training are not enough to help women of color advance; and (3) the social landscape within nonprofit organizations can create conditions that undermine the leadership of women of color.5 All of these issues require a shift in power in order to transform.

These findings and assertionsand moreare no surprise for BIPOC leaders in the sector; after all, organizations are a reflection of the broader white settler colonial project that drove the genocide of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of Africans. The colonial project is premised on stripping BIPOC people of the power in their lives. Thus, our social change work must be focused on dismantling the white settler colonial project and building power for all people oppressed by the projects subsequent systems. As a result of building power for Black people, we build power for all oppressed peoples (inside and outside our organizations); that is, when we center Black people, we uplift all people. The Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Societys Targeted Universalism primer describes this, asserting that when those most marginalized build power to shift policy that benefits them, it has the capacity to benefit other marginalized peoples.6

We have experienced this truth at CompassPoint. Our former staff set off on a journey to redefine CP as an equity and social justice organization back in 2016.7 When we began to move past equity as a frame and introduced a more nuanced pro-Black power stance (surfaced by our former co-director Lupe Poblano), we began to see the potential of understand- ing and expanding power. For instance, in 2018, we examined dependent insurance coverage for our staff, predicated on the principle of supporting the Black mothers in our organization. In 2022, CP passed a 100 percent dependent coverage provision for all staff, regardless of number of dependents. When Black staff developed an affinity group to build unity and discuss experiences of anti-Blackness within the organization, affinity groups for all staff commenced. Affinity groups have created a critical reflective space for relationship building for participants, for white and BIPOC staff to understand and dismantle their participation in anti-Blackness, and for staff to be able to surface requests to the organization safely. It was our affinity group of coordinators who led the way to CP bringing all our workshops online during COVID and emerging with a how-to manual for virtual learning. These examples and many more have been at the crux of several structural, policy, and procedural changes at CP, including reimagining staff compensation and employee benefits,8 increased program monies for Black programming (including for our Self-Care for Black Women in Leadership program, which evolved from a program funded internally to one that has so far graduated five cohorts with the support of multiple funders),9 and hiring our first Black (woman) executive in CPs nearly forty-seven-year history.10

Examples like CompassPoints and other organizations pro-Black efforts provide a way forward and data to help others with their power-building efforts. A good start for an organization wanting to take on pro-Black power building is to redirect ones attention away from two current popular approaches and frames: organizational anti-Blackness and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Organizations advancing the theory and praxis of building pro-Black power include Tides Advocacy, whose mission statement reminds us that Our Focus on Justice Requires Us to Be Pro-Black Every Day;11 Equity in the Center, which is partnering with the BIPOC Project to deliver a training titled Building Black Power: Dismantling Anti-Black- ness in Our Institutions and Movements;12 and Essie Justice Group, which in 2020 took on an intersectionality lens to develop a webinar and tools titled Black Feminist Institution Building: Employee Policies in the Age of COVID & Uprising in Defense of Black Life.13

The presiding concentration on confronting anti-Blackness often requires that Black staff define, defend, and solve their own experiences of oppression within organizations. Using pro-Black power as a frame draws in white staff and staff of color to interrogate their own anti-Black bias, as well as drawing the organization into challenging the systems, processes, policies, and practices, not just interpersonal behaviors or attitudes. It also allows us to center our efforts on solutions that materially shift the conditions of Black people, instead of diagnosing whether anti-Blackness is actually a problem within our organizations (a dangerous phenomenon that we see all too often).

Analogously, DEI initiatives often miss the interdependence of organizational components. This is not to say that the many DEI staff and officers who we admire, work with, and champion arent doing work that is fundamental. It is to say that diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks and initiatives miss the mark, because they consistently fail to clearly identify the fundamental need to shift power in an organization. In 2019, the Harvard Business Review published the article Does Diversity Training Work the Way Its Supposed To?,detailing the results of their experiment to measure the effectiveness of diversity training.14 According to Harvard Business Review, the results (published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) found very little evidence that diversity training affected the behavior of men or white employees overallthe two groups who typically hold the most power in organizations and are often the primary targets of these interventions.15 We would venture to say it is indeed working as its supposed toto intentionally not shift power. DEI initiatives have ignored the centrality of power, rather heavily focusing on diversity trainingamong other interventionsas the antidote to challenge (interpersonal) anti-Blackness. Additionally, DEI staff are isolated with few resources to do more than address one issue at a time, usually focusing on interpersonal relationships between staff wherever anti-Blackness is embedded.

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We are inspired by several alternative approaches and frames to DEI. Namely, we draw from Dr. Angela Davis, who tells us, If we do not know how to meaningfully talk about racism, our actions will move in misleading directions.16 The work of building pro-Black power allows us to journey in the right direction to meaningfully dismantle the vestiges of white settler colonialism that produce power disparities in our organizations. We also draw from Aida Mariam Davis (Dr. Angela Daviss niece-in-law), CEO and founder of Decolonize Design, whose article Diversity, Equity and Inclusion have failed. How about Belonging, Dignity and Justice instead? clarifies, The DEI industrial complex came into existence as a pre- emptive defense to avoid litigation by members of protected classes, particularly under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.17

Finally, we rely heavily and unequivocally on bell hookss Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, in which she asserts that in order to shift power, we must examine (1) how power has historically oppressed groups of people who are at the margins (in organizations, this is often BIPOC women and others who hold identities from traditionally oppressed communities), and (2) those who are at the center (in organizations this is often people who hold positions of authority, such as an executive director or a board member).18 hooks advises that to shift power, we must bring people from the margins into the center. This theory is integrated into all our workshop and training offerings, and has proven invaluable when starting conversations that examine power and privilege.

Since 2016, CompassPoint has engaged in reexamining our entire organization to dismantle white supremacy. This has required an active and intentional redesign of every detail of CP.19 In 2020, we stepped more deeply into this liberatory workthat is, we moved beyond equity to build a pro-Black organization. And in 2021, we realized that in order to build a pro-Black organization, we needed a more comprehensive framework. To help us continue evolving our praxis as a pro- Black organization, we developed an organizational model premised on a governance framework. Developing this model has allowed us to live into our core strategy, which is to live liberation from the inside out.20 We build structures, cultural practices, business strategies, and approaches to organizational change that bring us and the people with whom we work closer to liberation. We try on practices from the inside so that we can practice and then share what were learning. At the same time, we study ways in which leaders outside our practice are living into liberation, so that we can bring new learning in, creating a cycle of mutual reflection, practice, and change. We use the definition of governance from the Indigenous Governance Toolkit, which defines governance as how people choose to collectively organise themselves to manage their own affairs, share power and responsibilities, decide for themselves what kind of society they want for their future, and implement those decisions.21 This framework includes several interrelated components: values, principles, structure, decision making, culture, and community engagement.

We are developing practices around values that our Black staff hold in high regard, such as communalism, self-care, authenticity, distribution of power, transparency, and healing. These practices are our principles, and our principles shape our structureour systems, practices, policies, and procedures. Our organization is structured in three circles that allow for the sharing of power among staff, regardless of titles (a form we experimented with years ago, before endeavoring to build a pro-Black organization, when we explored the holacracy model).22

For example, our internal resilience circle, which coordinates all things traditionally understood as operations and human resources, manages our hiring processes for staff. Equipped with our commitment to distributing power, staff whose titles are coordinator or associate director in these circles often lead and participate in our hiring processes. Among other things, this builds confidence and a sense of ownership for all staff. This structure directly lends itself to the democratic decision-making processes we embark on at CompassPoint, because using modified consensus on major decisions allows staffparticularly Black staff, who often have little to no space in society to shape their circumstancesto shape the circumstances of the organization. All of thisthe values, principles, structure, and decision makingshapes the culture of the organization, which at CompassPoint we articulate as the norms, traditions, practices, expectations, ways of being, histories of being (including Ancestral knowledge), beliefs, and desires of our staff. It also shapes how we engage with our communities. When we feel misaligned regarding any circle, we take the time to dissect whyoften tracing back to our valuesand construct a more aligned way forward. And we have found that when weve experienced a more aligned way forward, its been when Black staff are centered.

All of these components of governance, if done with the values that Black people hold at the center, can go a long way to shaping a pro-Black organization. Whats additionally critical is to constantly build a foundational staff understanding of this governance approach. In fall of 2021, we instituted organization-wide political education; using Cyndi Suarezs book The Power Manual: How to Master Complex Power Dynamics, we engaged in a five-part internal study to dissect power in our lives and our organization.23 Fundamentally, we all now understand that ongoing political education builds power, because it builds the structural and conjunctive analysis of staffan essential ingredient for understanding and shaping circumstances. Indeed, political education is fundamental to building a pro-Black organizationjust as fundamental as our external workshops and cohort leadership programs that aim to build power within our community of participants.

CompassPoint designs and delivers intensive cohort leadership development programs, which bring leaders together in learning communities. These programs combine a set of core methodologies, including teaching, peer learning, coaching, and physical practice. In 2021, we launched our inaugural B.L.A.C.K. Equity Intensive, to take the work we did to begin transforming CompassPoint into a pro-Black organization and share it with our community.24 Twenty-seven participants, organized into nine teams of three, met online for six sessions between February and October 2021. We started with the premise that to catalyze change in an organization, its important to have multiple people pushing from within. We aimed to build community, explore equitable structures, ground in a pro-Black political stance, and build agency, all while stepping into our power. We used principles of popular education to create learning experiences that uphold self-determination, democratize participation, and engage everyone as both a teacher and a learnerall fundamental components to building pro-Black power. Popular education, a pedagogical approach to teaching and learning developed by educator Dr. Paulo Freire, aims to transform society by centering the experiences of everyday people.25

A few key tenets embedded in this pilot program will continue to be central to our power-building practice and continued programs and our cohort leadership programs. The tenets are the following:

***

Building pro-Black organizations is a necessity if we are to achieve our goals of liberatory transformation. It requires us to depart from solely challenging anti-Blackness or engaging in DEI efforts that dont seek to shift power. Inspired by our theoreticians, fellow organizations in the field, and a community of participants, we are committed at CompassPoint to resourcing the time and efforts needed to build pro-Black power in our organization and with our partners and community of participants. We aim to grow and scale the impact of this work, increase its accessibility, and share learnings and tools with more organizations and with the sector more broadly. We invite our community, including the organizations we serve, partners in the field, and philanthropic partners, to join us on this journey.

Excerpt from:

What It Looks Like to Build a Pro-Black Organization - Non Profit News - Nonprofit Quarterly

Local Colorado Springs business and economics experts focused on the changes and challenges created by population growth in the area during a recent El Pomar Foundation event. The expert panel discussed housing, jobs, racial diversity and more.

State demographer Elizabeth Garner presented recent trends, noting that the populations in Colorado Springs and El Paso County grew slightly faster than the state as a whole between 2010 and 2020, at 15 and 17.4 percent respectively. But it was not as high a percentage increase as the previous ten years.

Construction of new housing did not keep up with population growth during the last decade though, according to Garner, and that mismatch has stressed the market.

A lot of this constraint that we're feeling isn't because people were flocking here that we had no idea would come, she said. Fewer came than we thought. And we built fewer housing (units).

The segment of people 65 and older is growing faster than people under 18. If that trend continues as its forecasted to do, Garner said itll affect the economy, labor force, and public finance. One area in Colorado that illustrates this, she said, is the convergence of an aging population and lack of affordable housing. She cited her mom as an example.

My mom doesn't want to move and she is still in a 4,000-square-foot home living alone at 85, she said. But she loves her neighborhood. I call her a waste of a housing resource, Im her daughter so I can say it, that house should have five people in it, not one.

Garner said strategies are needed so people can downsize and stay in their communities as they age.

As part of the panel, Tony Rosendo, CEO and founder of Spur Philanthropy, responded to concerns about gentrification when building new housing. He said that up until 2015 there had been little development of the downtown area and that in order to "transform the city into the Colorado Springs of tomorrow," diversity and housing affordability needed attention.

Its important to stay out in front of these issues, he said, to make sure we keep our local flavor to projects and are not just selling our precious lands to larger developers.

There's an intentionality, as opposed to a passive nature of letting people develop your land and your communities.

And, overall wages have not kept pace with housing costs, according to Tatiana Bailey, who directs the UCCS Economic Forum. She said that makes it difficult to attract younger and more diverse workers.

Meanwhile, Bailey said the local economy has diversified beyond military and call center jobs during the last several decades and now theres a wide array of industries including technical, healthcare, and construction.

Any economist will tell you that's a good thing, Bailey said. You don't want all your eggs in one basket.

But she said, as the population ages, access to education for younger and more diverse groups of people is necessary to continue to support robust business growth.

We're not training people adequately for the jobs of today, Bailey said. The good news is that most of those jobs have livable wages. But we don't really provide the access. If we have a lot of racial ethnic minorities who are even more compromised, often in their ability to pay for that higher education, it's not going to work because that is our increasing proportion of our working-age people moving forward. So I think that we have to be intentional about looking at these trends.

Several of the panelists said they've seen an increase in efforts among business and community leaders to work together to address these challenges presented by the changing demographics in the Colorado Springs area.

The leadership in this town has grown so positively in the last 10 years, said Aikta Marcoulier, Executive Director of Pikes Peak Small Business Development. We're crossing roads, we're crossing those paths that have never been crossed before to ensure the small business community is being supported the best that it can be.

She spoke about how the community has become more diverse and at the same time has had to deal with wildfires, floods and the pandemic. Im obviously a minority. I'm a woman and I'm a spouse of a veteran so (I) check all the boxes, she said, but we've come together to support those communities and those communities came together to support us as well through all of this.

Original post:

Colorado Springs leaders look to the future through the lens of an aging population, education and affordable housing - Colorado Public Radio

Community colleges play a major role in workforce and economic development in communities across the Fifth District. Their responsibility for educating and connecting individuals to jobs means that understanding their outcomes is important to how we think about our best path to maximum employment and sustainable economic growth.

The primary data used to understand postsecondary outcomes in the United States is the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the U.S. Department of Education. Although IPEDS data are useful to understanding outcomes among four-year institutions of higher education, the data are fraught with issues for non-four-year institutions. The primary issue with IPEDS is that it was built for four-year schools and does not take into account the differing structure and purpose of community colleges. For example, the traditional IPEDS cohort, used to measure graduation rates, only includes first-time, full-time students. This works relatively well for four-year schools: A majority of their students are attending full time, and most who begin as freshmen are enrolling for the first time. However, many community college students attend part time or enroll after dropping out of a four-year institution or after attending another community college. Additionally, IPEDS only measures outcomes of students in for-credit programs, which leaves out many community college students, including those who, for example, complete a CDL (Commercial Drivers License) or a noncredit certificate in phlebotomy. This article will not only introduce a new data collection method directed specifically at community colleges but also will present some results. In the end, we believe that IPEDS underreports true community college success.

Why a Survey?

Over the past few years, the Richmond Fed has had dozens of conversations with community college administrators about how community colleges serve students and communities. Community colleges engage in valuable activities such as training the next generation of workers for in-demand jobs, partnering with local firms and industries to train workers, and teaching high school students via dual enrollment. Unfortunately, existing data collection methods on postsecondary outcomes do not provide a quantitative assessment of the true outcomes of community colleges. Individual community colleges use many metrics to gauge their success, but these can vary from school to school, which makes it hard to compare across institutions and track outcomes consistently over time. Thus, the Richmond Fed decided to use our survey tools to create a quantitative, consistent system of measuring the outcomes of community colleges.

Creating the Survey

One critical disadvantage of the current system for collecting community college outcomes (IPEDS) is that it was created for traditional four-year institutions. By using the same metrics and definitions to assess community colleges (i.e., graduation rates), community colleges appear to be doing a relatively poor job.

To better understand what should be measured when thinking about community college success, we conducted in-depth 90-minute conversations with 10 community colleges in our district. It was important for us to create a measurement system that came directly from the schools and reflected their definitions of success. To achieve this, we were intentional in the schools we conversed with and chose a diverse set of schools across our district based on a schools urban/rural status, location, and size.

Table 1. Profile of Pilot Community Colleges

* The District of Columbia has no public community colleges

The schools used many metrics to understand their performance. Luckily, several metrics were common among all 10 schools. In our conversations, we learned that in addition to outcome measures such as completion or transfer rates, we should look at enrollment data especially since the IPEDS cohort is narrow and excludes many students enrolled at the school. The table below shows the metrics that we believe as reported to us by and confirmed in follow-up conversations with the schools better reflect how community colleges are performing.

Table 2. Our Surveys Community College Success Metrics

Credit Students

Noncredit Students

High School Students in Early or Middle College Programs

High School Dual Enrollment or Dual Credit Students

Industry Partnerships

Schools already spend a significant amount of time reporting data to the government, accreditation bodies, and internal groups. The goal of this data collection program is to collect relevant metrics while not overburdening the schools. We attempted to keep the survey as short as possible by focusing on the metrics that were cited as important by each school and not collecting the lesser important metrics. The pilot schools reported that although there will be some upfront time in data preparation, the survey should not be overly burdensome in the longer run.

Although our proposed measurement program is better than existing sources, this survey is not perfect. In addition, not every community college has all of the data easily available, especially for noncredit students. Hopefully, as this research is socialized, more schools will collect and retain information on their students success.

What Weve Learned So Far

At this point, we have received data from nine of our 10 pilot schools. Although the available pilot data is still preliminary, some patterns were immediately apparent.

First, IPEDS greatly undercounts the success of students being served in for-credit community college programs. Our cohort measure, which includes all students who entered the school during the 2016-17 school year to take for-credit classes, is larger than the IPEDS cohort in every case. In urban schools, where they have more part-time students and students who are not first-time students, the difference is especially noteworthy. It is not surprising, therefore, that our student success metric, which we define as the share of all students in our cohort who graduate, transfer, receive a licensure or certificate, or persist in enrollment, is also higher in almost every case than the reported IPEDS outcome measure. In some cases, the IPEDS data are significantly undercounting what we believe to be the true success rate of for-credit students.

Secondly, the data that community colleges have on their noncredit programs and students are very messy. We knew from our conversations with community colleges that data collection on the noncredit side was not as robust as the for-credit side, partially because IPEDS doesnt include data on noncredit programs, so the community colleges do not have as much of an incentive to collect the information in an organized way. One exception is Maryland because the community college funding formula in the state funds for-credit and workforce-related noncredit programs equally. Therefore, data must be collected on noncredit programs and students for them to receive full funding. On the other hand, other Fifth District states either dont fund noncredit programs via state appropriations, or they fund them differently from for-credit programs, so the same extent of data collection is not mandated. Even though we expected the noncredit data to be less reliable than for-credit data, we were disappointed in the level of data we were able to obtain from our pilot colleges on noncredit programs and students. This is an area where great strides can be made in the future, and we hope that our survey will help to lead the charge.

Lastly, Fifth District community colleges are doing a tremendous amount to educate local high school students via dual enrollment and dual credit programs. The nine schools in our pilot enrolled over 11,700 high school students during the 2020-21 school year. Additionally, the nine schools granted a total of 949 degrees, licensures, or certificates to high school students.

Table 3: High School Students Served by Pilot Institutions

Note: We do not have permission to publicly release institutional-level data, so we masked the name of each school

Interestingly, the preliminary pilot data indicates that high school students have a higher course success rate than other students at community colleges. Over 86 percent of credit hours attempted by high school students at our nine schools were earned successfully, while the overall course success rate was 77.8 percent.

Whats Next in the Survey of Community College Outcomes

In spite of its current limitations, our pilot schools universally acknowledged the need for this sort of data collection system. The next step is to enroll more schools into the measurement program. Our end goal is to enable this to serve as a supplement to IPEDS. Nationwide, we need a measurement system that is reflective of all the ways that community colleges are providing value, so that prospective students, school counselors, parents, legislators, and researchers can better understand and articulate the role community colleges play in the educational and workforce systems. While IPEDS has made strides toward this, we believe a complete separate set of metrics is appropriate for community colleges due to their notable differences from four-year institutions.

We are grateful for the time and partnership of each school in this endeavor. We are equally grateful for the open and transparent dialogue we had with each school when creating this measurement system. The data reported in this article are just the beginning; as this program develops further, we expect continued iteration on how to define and measure the success of community colleges.

We will be hosting an event in early August to discuss our results in much greater detail and to explain our plans moving forward. All community colleges in the Fifth District, as well as state system offices, will be invited. If you would like to attend, please let us know

See the original post:

A New Endeavor: Introducing the Fifth District Survey of Community College Outcomes - Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond

Mental health should always be a priority, and its especially important in these challenging times filled with health concerns amidst a pandemic, economic woes and societal upheaval.

The end of an academic year can yield a rollercoaster of emotions for an entire community. While it is celebratory for many, this time is also exhausting and stressful for others. Everyone needs a moment to breathe and to pause.

Laura Ross, a middle school counselor in Gwinnett County, Georgia, shares that its not uncommon for some childrens stress levels or anxiety to increase at the end of the school year because that safe, structured space is going to be gone for a few months.

Its critical to identify those young people who may need additional support long before the end of the academic year. Support includes tangible resources such as lists of emergency numbers and helplines.

We talk about it throughout the school year, Ross says. Some of my students who need extra support in that area, [I] try to make sure that they leave for the summer with a reminder of coping strategies or any tools that they need to help them through feeling anxious or feeling isolated from others.

After returning to in-person learning, Ross says children continue to reel from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.

She explains that students concerns arent usually related to the virus. Apprehensions are often connected to socialization issues after being isolated for so long. She also notes that young people have become more reactive and are more likely to assume there is a conflict.

I dont know what it is exactly, but I have seen since the pandemic started and even now, more students talking about school not really being important, knowing when they can drop out in high school and really not having those future aspirations, Ross says.

Byron McClure, Ed.D., a Washington, D.C.-area school psychologist, created Lessons for SELan organization that administers support for youth, particularly Black boys and other historically marginalized studentsto ensure they see themselves in literature and social-emotional learning curricula.

As mental health awareness peaks in May, he emphasizes that mental wellness is always the goal.

When were discussing mental wellness, now were discussing being in a place to where you are well mentally, socially, emotionally, McClure says, where you can tap into positive relationships and getting along with others you are presenting the best version of yourself, which now, were leading into flourishing, which we dont talk about enough in education at all.

Community members and educators must learn the signs of mental illnessa specific diagnosable condition such as depression or anxiety disorders that affect mood, thinking and behavior. They can learn through mental health first-aid training, which is necessary to help school personnel identify resources so that young people can access proper care.

Everyone ... [including] students can receive mental health first-aid training, McClure notes.

He says as a psychologist, its not enough to just help people not feel unwell. He promotes thriving rather than just surviving.

If you look at the work coming out of positive psychology, [by] Martin Seligman and Chris Peterson, theres an emerging body of literature that puts forth this idea of how to flourish, how to thrive, even in the space of education, McClure says. Thats looking at positive emotions, thats looking at engagement, relationships, meaning and even achievement.

Reflecting helps improve mental health in a supportive culture. Ross says its just as important to reflect on moments of goodness and success as it is to reflect on things that went wrong.

Acknowledge they happen, feel what we feel about them and know that feeling is absolutely okay, she says. I dont think its about what we have to fix. ... I think right now, it really is about the pause and just feeling all that we felt this year. Thats it. Take that moment.

McClure says that school communities, especially, must reflect throughout the year to avoid falling into a fix it mode at the end of the year. He recommends step backs. Step backs are intentional touch points built in at least once each quarter to allow educators to reflect on their practices to see what is beneficial and what needs to be modified.

If youre only reflecting at the end of the year, you could be engaging in practices that have been harming students, that have been harming staff, McClure says. If you get to the end of the year, it is too late. Having those touch points built in throughout the course of the year will give you a higher likelihood of being successful.

Young people are often burdened with another layer of stress when they dont meet their academic expectations at the end of the school year. Their struggles could potentially get lost in a time when many others are celebrating.

Both Ross and McClure note that schools should avoid grade retention, if possible. But when it happens, there must be a community care plan in place that utilizes strength-based approaches.

Ideally, they will be moving through a multi-tier system of support that involves the school psychologists, the social workers [and] their parents, McClure says.

Furthermore, issues such as grade retention are system-level harms that should be discussed long before the end of the year.

Until you do a deep analysis of that, then that child is always going to be on a trajectory where they might be in these situations at the end of the year, McClure says. I think its ideal for schools to have systems in place to where those students arent falling through the cracks.

Young people and adults are experiencing intense emotions in this contentious social and political moment. With new policies and laws targeting Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ communities, McClure contends that there has to be a concerted effort to support those communities and share accurate information to reduce confusion.

We also have to make sure that we are prioritizing creating the space where young people can process and make sense of whats happening, because our young people are under attack, he says. Make no mistake about it.

Ross is an advisor for her schools Gay-Straight Alliance and says issues like Floridas Dont Say Gay law have made these young people feel devalued.

Thats the message that they get, that theyre less than, that theres something wrong with them, their stories arent important, Ross explains.

Schools and communities must embrace diverse and inclusive environments to support youth who absorb the chaos created by discriminatory policies and laws.

Are we making sure that all of our students see that theres opportunity for them? Ross asks. Theyre important and significant in our community. I think it takes listening to what our students say they are experiencing and what they want and need that will better this community for them.

Educators are struggling to rebuild the cultures in their schools and connect with students following two turbulent years. Counselors and psychologists are integral to that rebuilding, but many schools do not have enough on staff. According to the American School Counselor Association, the recommended ratio of school counselor to students is 1-to-250. The National Association of School Psychologists recommends a school psychologist to student ratio of 1-to-500.

However, current data estimates a ratio of 1-to-415 for counselors and 1-to-1211 for psychologists. And thats why its essential to leverage social networks and advocate for more funding for mental health professionals.

McClure said parents and caregivers are a vital piece of the school community who often arent invited to help make decisions and alleviate problems. Essentially, to best benefit young people, school leaders must check their power.

You can cede power by inviting people, such as parents, community partners, students themselves, and giving them a seat at the table, inviting them into the decision-making process, he says.

Ross focuses primarily on cultural responsiveness and sustaining connections with her students. She says since the pandemic, young people have been leaning on each other, which is a good sign. But educators must be intentional about making connections with children as they continue to struggle. And to do that, they have to explore their own identities and interrupt their biases.

At Ross school, staff engages in community circles with each other and with students. They also host events and activities that welcome people who support the school.

Its a reminder that we have folks all around, whether they are parents, the guardians, community members, or business owners, she says. They want to contribute to our school.

Obtain mental health first-aid training to spot signs of mental health disorders.

Byron McClure, Ed.D., recommends the Three Good Things exercise, a concept developed by psychologist Martin Seligman and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania. They have found a way to scientifically increase levels of happiness while decreasing rates of depression through this three good things activity, McClure says. All it requires a person to do is to reflect on three things that went well or three good things that happened throughout the course of a persons day.

Celebrate all accomplishments, not solely grades.

Make space for young people to join community circles and other spaces at school or in the broader community to express their thoughts, feelings and concerns.

Use this toolkit to build resilience and reduce mental health stigma in your community.

Visit link:

The End-of-Year Mental Health Check - Tolerance.org