About Raising Readers Nashville
Formerly known as Blueprint for Early Childhood Success, our collective impact group developed a new identity in 2023 with the name Raising Readers Nashville. We are collaborating to improve the systems and structures supporting Nashville’s families and young children.
The partners involved with Raising Readers Nashville have deep understanding of the complexities of this work and are committed to the communication and collaboration needed to realize long-term change. Raising Readers Nashville works to maintain a highly diverse group of involved partners to more deeply understand varying perspectives, in order to develop more informed solutions and positive outcomes.
Sources
Raising Readers Nashville is committed to utilizing the most up-to-date information to drive our work, whether that information comes from academic literature, best practices from other efforts, or our own community members. To support this commitment, we referenced the framework developed by the North Carolina Early Childhood Foundation as well as the framework from Bright Start TN, customized for the unique needs of Tennessee communities. Together, these frameworks are composed of three domains:
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1. High-Quality Birth-Through-Age-Eight Learning Environments
High-quality child care, pre-kindergarten programs, and elementary schools are culturally competent, work to fully understand and adapt to the home cultures of the children in their care, use effective, developmentally-appropriate curricula to build their students’ foundational learning skills, and take into account students’ social-emotional development by maintaining positive discipline and healthy school climates.
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2. Physical Health, Mental Health and Development on Track Beginning at Birth
Good physical and mental health help ensure children are successful learners from their earliest years, putting them on the pathway for grade level proficiency. Children who are often sick, have tooth pain, are dealing with chronic unmanaged or undiagnosed physical or mental health conditions, or who struggle with developmental delays and lack the supports they need often fall behind their peers in school. Good health in utero, good birth outcomes, developmental screenings, and access to health and mental health services as needed, are all crucial to laying a strong and healthy early learning foundation.
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3. Supported and Supportive Families and Communities
Positive parent and child interactions, such as talking, playing, and reading together help children grow stronger emotionally, develop larger vocabularies, and learn more easily. Mental health and substance abuse services, nutrition supports, access to resources and opportunities otherwise unaffordable for their families, and services that build parents’ skills and knowledge of child development are all examples of supports that can improve caregivers’ capacity to effectively support children to thrive and achieve success in school.
Data Sources
Our approaches and strategies are based on the research, data, and resources from the following organizations:
About Collective Impact
Raising Readers Nashville uses a collective impact framework, which is composed of 5 key elements with a priority on actions that center equity. Collective impact is a powerful approach to cross-sector collaboration that is achieving measurable effects on major social issues.
Collective impact groups are supported by a backbone organization, which is an individual organization that provides staff, resources, and skills needed to convene and coordinate participating organizations. United Way of Greater Nashville is proud to serve as the backbone organization for Raising Readers Nashville.
The qualities of a healthy collective impact model include
Strong backbone: an organization dedicated to aligning and coordinating the work of the group
Common agenda: a shared definition of the problem and shared vision for how to address it
Shared measurement: systems that track progress and outcomes in the same way to foster continuous learning and accountability
Mutually reinforcing activities: the integration of partners’ different streams of work to maximize resources and efforts
Continuous communication: consistent communication focused on building transparency, trust, and strong relationships
Backbone organization
Backbone Staff
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Megan Godbey
Director
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Julie Gwinn
Associate Director
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Nat Flammia
Senior Manager, Operations
Let’s connect.
For more information about Raising Readers Nashville, please contact us. We look forward to hearing from you.
Raising Readers Nashville
c/o United Way of Greater Nashville
250 Venture Circle
Nashville, TN 37228