Help Get FUEL for 50 on Stage at SXSW 2023!
To help spread the word about FUEL for 50 and the role for everyone in supporting our youngest children, our early childhood team has proposed several panels for SXSW 2023. Help us get on stage at SXSW by voting and sharing our proposals by Sunday, August 21st!
Voting requires a free SXSW account, but after that it’s easy! Register and then click the “Vote Up” arrow on your panels of choice. You can search in the PanelPicker or come back to this post – we’ve included links for all FUEL and Robin Hood proposals below.
SXSW — March 10–18, 2023
Centering Community & Equity in Child Development
We all know that “it takes a village” — but the community organizations that vulnerable families rely on most are still largely shut out of early childhood funding. Guided by community input, a new $10m initiative in New York City aims to transform early learning by elevating 50 local programs focused on parents and caregivers of young children. With help from partners like public libraries and selection led by parents and nonprofit leaders, the project is crossing boundaries and building insights from work in immigration, health, housing, reentry and more. Learn why the nation’s largest fund devoted to early learning is focusing on neighborhood-level programs and partners outside the field of child development — and what philanthropies have to gain from democratizing their approach.
SXSW EDU — March 6–9, 2023
Democratizing Access to Early Childhood Funding
We know that those with lived experience of poverty, recent immigration, and incarceration are best equipped to support vulnerable families — so how can we support them? A new philanthropic prize in NYC is working to put community first and engage wide-ranging nonprofits in early childhood work. Panelists will discuss the power of community partnerships to disrupt systemic bias and learnings from FUEL for 50, a 3-year initiative to support 50 programs focused on caregivers of children ages 0–3.
Promoting Racial Equity in Early Intervention
There is a historic racial equity gap in children’s access to Early Intervention (EI) services. While the New York City EI Program serves all eligible children from birth to age three with developmental delays, black and brown families are consistently referred and retained at lower rates. Learn how Robin Hood, New York’s largest poverty-fighting organization, worked with government and non-profit partners to use community health and digital strategies to make strides in closing this gap.
Productive School-Family Partnerships for Learning
As the country reeled from pandemic-driven school closures, Columbia’s Center for Public Research and Leadership (CPRL), in partnership with Robin Hood, found that schools that engaged families through high-quality instructional materials and technology saw the same or better outcomes than a ‘normal’ year. Focusing on schools serving Black and Brown students from low-income backgrounds, this session provides real-world examples of how digitally accessible, high-quality instructional materials sustain productive partnerships between schools and families.
Models for Metacognition: Accelerating Learning
Students worldwide have been set back by years of learning disruption, but those in poverty have been affected disproportionately. In New York, a team of educators, researchers, curriculum development, and professional learning organizations supported by Robin Hood, the city’s largest poverty-fighting organization, has focused on testing metacognition and computational thinking as critical skills for the most disadvantaged students to personalize and accelerate their learning. Reporting from a year’s work in the field, this session will share the results of their research and clear, easy-to-adopt models for teachers and their students to learn metacognitive strategies while improving digital and computational fluency.