In February 2018, Illinois Action for Children (IAFC) was awarded a five-year grant through the Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) to develop a statewide training and technical assistance system, building the capacity of community collaborations to improve early childhood education systems.
IAFC supports communities as they work to develop and implement community-wide, collaborative strategies to ensure more children, ages birth-to-five, enroll in and regularly attend high-quality early learning programs.
The CS3 project has four goals:
- Provide foundational supports (training, access to planning, and collaboration tools) to early childhood professionals, at no cost, in support of their goal to form and/or strengthen community collaborations that are focused on improving local early childhood systems.
- Provide targeted supports (including individualized coaching) to select communities that wish to receive in-depth support that is focused on increasing the number of children ages birth-to-five who are enrolled in high-quality early learning services.
- Collaborate and coordinate with existing statewide providers of early childhood training to align training opportunities across systems.
- Implement a data and evaluation process to support continued system improvement at the community and state level.
Supports for Early Childhood Community Collaborations
Visit the Partner Plan Act website to learn more about community systems development and the supports available to early childhood collaborations including:
- Partner Plan Act Collaboration Institute (PPACI)
- On-Demand Consultation
- On-Demand Learning
- Community-to-Community (C2C) Mentorship Program