“The Head Start Innovation Fund is an $11 million effort, launched in 2013, aimed at improving the quality of Head Start services and outcomes for children and their families in Detroit and the tri-county region of Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. Collectively, this geographic area serves over 6,000 children through Head Start and Early Head Start. The Innovation Fund is supported by a group of 10 regional and national foundations.
The Innovation Fund awards competitive grants to Head Start providers, as well as strategic support for system-wide needs, such as oversight of a monthly Learning Network, creation and administration of a common enrollment campaign, comprehensive data collection, and provision of collaborative access to shared resources, such as quality training.
Grant highlights include:
- Unique partnerships between universities and Head Start agencies to build teacher pipelines. New St. Paul Tabernacle, a Detroit-based Head Start agency, partnered with Madonna University to focus on training early educators.
- Staff development and appreciation activities like those at Starfish Family Services, which included several all-staff outings and self-care days.
- An online learning management system that enabled Matrix Human Services to deliver relevant and required on-demand training and development to its more than 900 staff members across multiple locations.
- Deep capacity building at the agency leadership level to build sustainability and increase staff tenure and quality, like at United Children and Families Head Start.
Highlights of larger, system-wide activities of the Innovation Fund include:
- Partnership across all agencies on citywide enrollment activities and events, data collection and teacher recruitment. Supported a system-wide enrollment marketing campaign increased enrollment in Detroit Head Start agencies from 70 percent to 84 percent, year-over-year. The campaign included the launch of DetroitHeadStart.com and a Facebook.com/DetroitHeadStartNetwork.
- Enabled access to resources that are shared by all Head Start agencies, such as research, data, access to national experts, training, teacher recruitment tools and marketing.
- Created knowledge through a tri-county study of quality early childhood seats and where there are gaps. A video of the report can be found here.
- Conducted a scan of Early Educators, learning about challenges and opportunities around recruitment and retention. A copy of the report can be found here.
- Underwrote a comprehensive teacher recruitment strategy and campaign to increase the pool of qualified early childhood educators as a result of the scan.”
Excerpted from https://cfsem.org/initiative/early-childhood-innovation-fund/