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