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Research has proven that children are best supported when communities and schools work together for positive outcomes for youth. This includes conveying a unified message around healthy food and lifestyle choices. The Alliance for a Healthier Generation recently launched the Smart Food Planner, a tool that helps community organizations find ideas for healthy snacks, meals, and beverages for everything from events to everyday afterschool activities. The tool makes it easier for schools and community organizations to quickly find healthy options for a variety of events.

This study examines an initiative sponsored by the Wallace Foundation aimed at improving the financial management skills and practices of 25 Chicago afterschool providers through training and coaching. The effort provided and tested two models for professional development: intensive customized training and less costly group training and coaching. Both models produced long-lasting improvements. Moreover, organizations receiving the group training improved almost as much as those receiving customized training, albeit over the course of 3 years rather than 2.

Have you considered partnering with other youth-serving systems in your community to better serve the youth population in your afterschool program? This blog post by the American Youth Policy Forum highlights possible partnerships, the benefits to building a community of support, and examples of partnerships that have already been forged. These partnerships help support youth-whether through STEM-related activities, simply getting youth outdoors, or creating opportunities for youth employment-by building on the strengths of each organization.

Safety is a number one priority in afterschool programs. When thinking about safety, providers must think about how safe an environment is when the children are actively engaged and moving toys and equipment from one part of the room to another. This article by the National AfterSchool Association guides afterschool practitioners through critical safety issues and provides a link to the Council on Accreditation that has specific guidelines for creating a safe environment for the students you serve.

The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) provides a tremendous opportunity for the State Afterschool Networks and other statewide afterschool organizations to elevate the importance of afterschool and summer learning programs with key audiences and secure additional out-of-school time resources. This online toolkit and playbook from the Afterschool Alliance is designed to help networks and their allies understand which parts of the new law have the most potential to support afterschool and summer learning programs. It provides guidance and tools to help networks engage with state and local audiences, including information about who to engage, which messages to use, and how to participate in critical discussions.

A new report from Columbia University Teachers College describes developments in the current generation of cross-sector collaborations for education and presents findings from a scan of initiatives across the United States. Commissioned by the Wallace Foundation, the report explores in part the prominent new model of collaboration known as “collective impact” while acknowledging that many thriving partnerships of school systems, governments, and community organizations predate the recent surge of interest in collaboration. The nationwide scan of initiatives found that almost 40 percent of collaborative efforts to improve education are located in the Midwest.

This professional development article from the National AfterSchool Association begins by recognizing that there is no single recipe for building effective leadership. The author, Amanda Meeson, who is vice president of programming with The Leadership Program, reached out to her own team for examples of how she helps build their leadership. She then shares the team’s take on what is working in their community. The exercise serves as a model of how vulnerability and transparency can be an important element of effective leadership.

ACT Now is excited to announce the launch of its Illinois Statewide Quality Standards. ACT Now has undertaken an initiative to develop Quality Standards in order to improve afterschool programming. These Quality Standards capture practices that have been demonstrated, through research, to lead to quality programs and positive outcomes for children. The Quality Standards provide afterschool programs with a common language for describing quality, as well as a “high bar” for individual programs to hold themselves accountable. Starting this month, ACT Now will hold trainings on the Standards around the state. A training is scheduled in Champaign/Urbana on June 14, 2016. More locations for trainings will be announced later this summer. To learn more about ACT Now or the Quality Standards, contact Susan Stanton, Network Lead, at sstanton@voices4kids.org or 312-516-5564, or visit ACT Now’s website.

Extending quality improvement efforts from the school year into the summer is the goal of the Summer Learning Program Quality Intervention (PQI). The continuous improvement intervention was developed as part of an ongoing collaboration between the David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality and National Summer Learning Association. Its approach includes adapting school-year tools to provide high-impact support to summer programs. Hosted by the two collaborating organizations, this webinar recording explains the context of the project, the findings from the 2013-14 pilot, and next steps.

Many schools see student attendance start to decline in spring months. In response to this challenge, ExpandED Schools created Avoiding the Attendance Slump: Strategies to Maximize Learning Time in June. This resource guide offers specific strategies to increase learning time and attendance rates, boost engagement, minimize summer learning loss, and accelerate performance in the next grade.