Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

NAFSCE Awarded $440,000 for Planning and Stakeholder Engagement Initiative

  • 12/16/15

The National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement (NAFSCE) announces that it will launch a planning and stakeholder engagement initiative with generous funding awards of nearly $400,000 from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and $40,000 from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.

“This is an exciting time for our young association,” said Vito J. Borrello, Executive Director of NAFSCE. “We intend to bring together the broad field of professionals and parent leaders impacting family engagement, to create a long term plan for the advancement of this new association and as the impetus for the creation of a national movement.”

Over the past three months, NAFSCE has raised more than $1 million to support the growth of the association.

“At the Kellogg Foundation, family engagement is a shared responsibility of families, schools and communities to help all students thrive, said Felicia DeHaney, Director of Education and Learning at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation. “We support NAFSCE’s comprehensive initiative to build strategies beyond the traditional approaches to parental involvement that we believe can profoundly impact students’ academic achievement.”

According to Borrello, building a unifying entity to support the advancement of effective family engagement policy and practice is essential, if families are to receive the priority they deserve as a key strategy to promote child development, student achievement and school improvement.

“I am so pleased to see that the vision for a professional membership association to advance our field is being realized and that the funding community is embracing us,” said Susan M. Shaffer, NAFSCE Chair and Co-Founder.

NAFSCE will hire McKinley Advisors, a Washington DC-based association management firm. They will coordinate the stakeholder engagement effort to create a strategic plan and aligned business plan to support NAFSCE’s vision of a world where family engagement is universally practiced as an essential strategy to support children’s learning and advance equity. NAFSCE’s cradle to college constituency of early childhood providers, K-12 educators, policymakers, researchers, and community-based organizations will be recruited to participate in the initiative.

The National Association for Family, School, and Community Engagement (NAFSCE) was launched in September 2014 to advance high impact policy and practice to promote child development and improve student achievement. For more information and to register for the listserv, go to www.NAFSCE.org.

Featured

  • Virginia Tech Tops Out New College of Engineering Building

    Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., recently celebrated the topping out of Mitchell Hall, which will soon stand as the largest College of Engineering building on campus, according to a news release. The university partnered with Skanska on the 285,500-square-foot facility, which has an expected completion date of winter 2028.

  • Montclair State University Starts Construction on $120M STEM Building

    Montclair State University in Montclair, N.J., recently broke ground on a new $120-million Interdisciplinary Science Building, according to university news. The university partnered with HoK Architects for the project’s design, and it’s scheduled to open in time for the 2028–29 academic year.

  • Rethinking K-12 Schools as a Continuous Learning Experience

    Most students move through three or more separate facilities during their K-12 journey, yet the built environments they encounter at each stage have traditionally been designed in isolation, with little continuity in spatial language, learning philosophy, or physical resources. Each new school is a reset with different layouts, learning models, expectations, and ways of moving through a building. The next generation of school design is making the case that the first day of kindergarten and the last day of high school can and should feel connected through common support systems and infrastructure in the physical environment.

  • Minnesota District Converts Middle School into Community Hub

    White Bear Lake Area Schools in White Bear Lake, Minn., recently announced the end of a major renovation project that converted a former middle school into a new centralized district and community hub, according to a news release.