Future Ready Collier was organized around two distinct goals: help young children be ready to thrive when they reach kindergarten, and support older children as they graduate and prepare for college or career. Along the way, a third goal was added, to lift up students along their academic pathways from elementary through high school. These goals were connected to working groups, which focused their attention on specific priority areas. Now, those priority areas are being elevated, as Future Ready Collier continues to evolve its efforts for the best use of resources and time, and most meaningful impact in the community.
Future Ready Collier’s Goal Groups
Alongside the Early Development and the College and Career goal groups, addition of School Success as a guiding purpose unintentionally created challenges for Future Ready Collier (FRC) network participants. Historically, goal groups met once per quarter, coordinating around the school year. Priority teams were asked to meet and talk independently in between goal group sessions. When FRC’s mission grew from two to three primary goals, quarterly meeting schedules had to expand from one day to two.
For those who participated in more than one goal group, this became a significant commitment of time away from their day-to-day job duties, with added expectations related to new priority teams. Also, many priority teams had a hard time keeping up their intended momentum along the way. Too many crises — major hurricanes and a multiyear pandemic that upended education around the world — made it difficult to focus on long-term desires when the urgency of tomorrow’s needs needed attention.
Through it all, however, FRC’s network remained committed and true to its originating purpose — to measure, gather, and share data and best practices around education and child development, for the benefit of students and families, as well as the entire community. With that in mind, beginning with the 2023-2024 school year, FRC is adopting an updated group structure, to streamline meeting participation, and enhance members’ abilities to commit to the priority areas they are most invested in.
Goals Become Action: Introducing a New Group Structure
The new group structure will be centered around seven priorities and divided into action teams. Each action team is open to anyone within the FRC membership, regardless of their previous goal group affiliation. For example, FRC members who had identified with the Early Development or College and Career goal groups, but who share an interest in literacy, may choose to now belong to the literacy action team. And School Success members who want to support work-based learning will join that action team. Moreover, this revised team structure better accommodates FRC participants with interests in multiple focus areas.
FRC’s action teams will include: Early Development, Quality Childcare, Literacy, Parent Engagement, Out of School Time, Work-Based Learning, and Access to Post-Secondary Education. True to FRC’s collaborative nature, these were preliminarily discussed at the May goal group meetings, to solicit participants reactions and feedback. The expectation is to formally launch the action teams during the 2023-2024 school year.
During its history, FRC has been highly adaptive to changing circumstances. This reflects another instance of the network’s strong commitment to partnership and collaboration. Student and family benefit continues to be the unifying mission. A new approach to network engagement ensures that members’ needs and interests are met. FRC membership is open to any organization with a demonstrated interest in student and family support. To learn more about FRC and how to get involved, please email info@futurereadycollier.org.