Giving Compass' Take:

• The Dual Generation partnership, part of the Family-Centered Community Change Initiative, is a consortium of city agencies and social service providers that works on improving early childhood education centers in San Antonio. 

• What could the addition of charitable giving do for this consortium? How is early childhood education benefitting from collaborative efforts? 

• Read about the power of education data for early childhood learning. 

Low-income communities across the country are facing an acute lack of quality, affordable early care and education (ECE) for children. San Antonio’s Eastside is one of those communities, so local organizations came together to address the problem.

In 2012, a consortium of city agencies and social service providers with a history of collaboration formed the Dual Generation partnership, part of the Family-Centered Community Change Initiative (FCCC).

Dual Generation aimed to move the needle on intergenerational poverty in the city’s historically low-income and underserved Eastside through combining parent and child interventions—an initiative based on the growing evidence (PDF) that serving multiple generations within households is more effective at interrupting the cycle of poverty than serving each generation separately. The Urban Institute has been evaluating Dual Generation’s implementation since 2014.

Dual Generation leadership planned and executed a years-long strategy to improve the quality of ECE centers in the partnership’s service footprint. Over four years, Dual Generation funded ongoing coaching to center staff and leadership at three centers in five quality domains—nutrition, parent involvement, curriculum, caregiver-child interactions, and indoor and outdoor activities—that are assessed to earn a Texas Rising Star (TRS) rating, the state’s quality rating and improvement system.

The partnership provided the centers funding to improve their facilities and teaching materials to the standards TRS requires. The partnership also provided funding for classroom teachers to obtain Child Development Associate credentials and other education and training related to early childhood development.

Read the full article about early childhood education by Amelia Coffey at Urban Institute.