To effectively support students across the United States, public schools need to pull and coordinate funding from federal, state and local sources. Partnerships between agencies across sectors and with community-based organizations can be challenging but necessary; schools alone cannot address all the needs of young people. This work requires the blending and braiding of different funding streams.
In early October, the U.S. Department of Education launched a Blending and Braiding webinar series to assist local educational agencies in supporting students. The first webinar, “How to Blend and Braid Federal, State, and Local Funds to Provide Easily Accessible Services to Students and Families,” featured an overview of blending and braiding funds and explained how to do it in ways that make it easier for services to be provided and accessed.
At a broad level, blending means combing funds from multiple sources into a single pot for a common purpose or initiative. When funds are blended, they lose their individual identity. This means the blended pot of funds has its own reporting requirements. A far more common approach is through braiding funding streams, which is coordinating funds from different sources for one purpose or initiative. Braided funding sources keep their specific identity, meaning each of the funding streams maintains their own reporting requirements.
Community school support
Abe Fernández, director of the National Center for Community Schools, talked about the current anxiety some LEAs are experiencing due to the expiration of pandemic relief funds. “Sustainability is not only about funding,” he said. “In fact, what seems to have the most impact for the long-term health and sustainability of the [community schools] strategy are things like having a shared vision, having a results framework and being clear about what it is you are trying to sustain. It’s also important to have community support and engagement in the life and governance of a community school. Partnerships and processes like assets and needs assessments really help to set the stage for sustainability.
“Second, the finance project framework calls out the need for strategic financing. That means in part recognizing that community schools and promise neighborhoods can both add both human and financial resources to schools,” Fernandez continued. “It also means there has to be attention paid to blending and braiding funding. We have seen how both education and non-education dollars from multiple sources can and should be leveraged to add value to the work in schools and in neighborhoods.”
In addition to researching and accessing funding from state funding streams, the White House has released a toolkit reviewing federal resources to support community schools.
Panelist Dreama Gentry, president and CEO of Partners for Rural Impact, spoke about the importance of braiding funding streams, especially for lower resourced LEAs. “Most of our work is about braiding the dollars together from different federal agencies, and also private dollars. Working in rural America, often those federal dollars are the primary resource,” she said. “What we’ve learned throughout the years in the braiding of the dollars can help you surpass the outcomes that you envision when you design a community school or promise neighborhood. It can also help sustain the work.”
The LEA perspective was provided by Kim McWilliams, chief officer of Family, School, and Community Partnerships in the Evansville-Vanderburgh School Corporation school district in Indiana, who spoke about forming community partnerships to support students.
“We began by having diverse stakeholders come together at what we called ‘the big table,’” McWilliams said. “The big table is a smorgasbord of agencies that all came together with a common goal to establish schools as places of community that enhance youth and families. That table led to a lot of other organizations in the community coming together and build the same vision.”
This establishment of a common vision for students and families led to conversations on what organizations can contribute resources to the shared vision of full-service community schools.
Promise neighborhoods
Several panelists mentioned “promise neighborhoods” in conjunction with community schools. A promise neighborhood is a place-based, collective-impact approach to improving results for children and families. The transformative vision of the Promise Neighborhoods Initiative is that all children and youth growing up in these spaces have access to great schools and strong systems of family and community support.
Promise neighborhoods weave together people, services and organizations to create a seamless cradle-to-career pipeline, along which community members have access to high-quality early care and education, smooth and effective transition to kindergarten, excellent K-12 school educations, and pathways to achieve postsecondary and career success.
A promise neighborhood is particularly capable of addressing issues that worsened during the pandemic, such as chronic absenteeism and community violence due to three key characteristics: a strong backbone organization to support families, which can take years to build; flexible funding targeted for year-round K-12 interventions; and networks of partnerships that draw on the internal resources of the community, such as local organizers, trusted elders, and youth leaders, to guide services to those who need them most.
The strong foundational partnerships created by the Evansville-Vanderburgh district, along with a lead partner in the University of Evansville, allowed them to build a 23-organization coalition and win a U.S. Department of Education Promise Neighborhood grant.
