Be close to the causes you serve. Rather than simply checking a numerical box, we need to ask ourselves, how are we supporting the people we serve? These themes resonated throughout our Lunch & Learn: Turning Roadblocks Into On-Ramps discussion.
Angie Bush, Executive Director of Hospitability House of Charlotte, led a discussion with Sherri Chisholm, Executive Director of Leading on Opportunity, and Vernisha Crawford, founder and CEO of B.Y.E. (Bringing You Excellence), who leads trauma-informed capacity building and workforce development programs. Ms. Chisholm opened the program with an overview of the 2014 Chetty Study and the work of Leading on Opportunity since its inception. In the past five years, our community has worked together to re-route busses, raise millions for affordable housing, and launch MECK Pre-K, which provides equitable access to high-quality early childhood education. Despite these incredible efforts, there are still gaps preventing our community’s progress in providing greater social mobility for all.
To overcome these gaps, Leading on Opportunity has a renewed focus. While the organization will still emphasize the importance of early care and education, and child and family stability, they are focusing on college and career readiness as an area with great potential to impact change. Leading on Opportunity has identified several intervention points for young adults ages 16 to 24 that can lead to a significant change in their lives. Those inflection points include when a person begins high school, applies for post-high school educational programs, and enters the workforce. They are partnering with leaders from Mecklenburg County, the City of Charlotte, the Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, and the Charlotte Executive Leadership Council to bring an evidence-based, data-driven plan to support college and career readiness.
But our community’s traditional approach of raising money, creating new programs, and measuring success with quantitative data may not be enough. Ms. Crawford encourages us to look beyond numbers and statistics. If we measure success by simply counting enrollment data, we are missing the mark. We are serving real people, with real-life stress, and real trauma. Ms. Crawford challenges us to think beyond creating new educational programs and to focus on the people who are enrolled. Once a student is enrolled in a program, often we expect them to perform – show up to class, study hard, and achieve a high GPA. But for so many people, the stress of a young child at home, a lack of childcare or stable housing, or the trauma they have faced impacts their performance. We need to ask ourselves how stress impacts a person’s social-emotional well-being and how they show up to be productive. When we ask ourselves these tough questions, we dig deeper and become trauma-informed. Reframing our services to focus on the real people we serve may reshape how we define success. Perhaps we step away from counting enrollment data and focus on whether we provided actual support to allow a student to show up and thrive.
