By Jaleesa Hall

Recently, Raising A Village Foundation has secured a paid contract to do education programs in a local DC school. This is our first paid contract and something I have wanted for Raising A Village for a long time, especially when thinking about sustainable revenue streams. Now that we are about to start in two weeks, its time to put up or shut up. In other words, the time my team and I used over the last four months to prepare curriculum, systems, and plans now needs to be implemented. I am a bit nervous, hoping that all things will go as well as it can. So it begins... Let's see if this really works!

By Jaleesa Hall

We are in the process of securing another partnership school in Ward 7 entitled H.D. Woodson High School starting in Spring 2019 through Fall 2019. At that time, we plan to measure our success by using an initial, mid-point and final evaluation by surveys of participating students to assess the programs efficacy in helping them develop targeted skill sets. Surveys include multiple choice and free-form elements designed to cover the three themes of college, career, and community in module one to gauge Raising A Village’s ability to assist with curriculum and program objectives and to seek insights for improvements.

Program measures were created via SurveyGizmo software. Surveys include multiple choice and free-form elements designed to gauge the Institute’s ability to assist with curriculum and program objectives and to seek insights for improvements. This software was chosen because it contains standard summary reports, advanced branding with custom domains, business integrations (Google Spreadsheets, API Control, Webhooks), JavaScript actions, segmentation, longitudinal, scheduled report runs, profile reports, Excel and PDF Exports. The data will be collected and transcribed into a qualitative and quantitative report for future program use and for the review of our grantee Campus Compact Mid-Atlantic to track our progress for the upcoming grant cycle.

By Jaleesa Hall

​​This semester, we planned to launch our program at Friendship Collegiate Academy, located in the Ward 7 corridor of Northeast Washington, D.C. At the beginning of the summer, we created an advisory board to develop a series of recommendations designed to improve the implementation of the project and to inform all partners on the ways to work collaboratively. The committee was created with the help of the Principal and Academic Director of Friendship Collegiate Academy, the Founder of Raising A Village Foundation, and the Interim Director of the Institute for Community Engagement. This committee initiated an asset-mapping approach to do three things: (1) a preliminary search to understand the landscape of the surrounding neighborhood of the school, (2) staff interviews to assess the needs and wants of all partners, (3) school interviews to round out conversations directly with Friendship Collegiate Academy teachers and administrators in order to gather information about immediate classroom needs.