October 2022 - Ready for School, Ready for Life

Staff profile: Stephanie Skordas

Stephanie Skordas celebrated her second anniversary as Ready Ready’s director of marketing and communications last month. She joined our organization after more than ten years of working in higher education strategic communications in a neighboring county, and shortly after the pandemic transitioned everyone to online education, including her youngest daughter in middle school.

“I had an appreciation for the steps Guilford County Schools was taking to help make the transition after seeing how a private, liberal arts university had to pivot so quickly,” Skordas said. “That reignited my passion for early childhood education.”

A former marketing director at the Greensboro Children’s Museum, now Miriam P. Brenner Children’s Museum, Skordas brought some of the lessons she learned from her mother, a former preschool teacher turned mental health counselor, to her communications efforts. “She has a way of making a story come alive, and understanding what children need to succeed from the very beginning,” Skordas said, “and I saw how she made a difference in her students’ lives before they started kindergarten.”

While her work at Ready Ready runs the gamut from monthly newsletters, to website updates, social media, media relations, public will-building, and more, Skordas says she values the principles Ready Ready weaves through all its work. “The focus on being family-led, inclusive, equity-driven, responsive to evidence, transparent, and collaborative is critical to the system-building work we’re doing,” she said. “As a former journalist, I feel so strongly about how communities that are aware and informed can make amazing strides together.”

When she’s not creating written or multimedia content for Ready Ready, you can find this flamingo aficionado chaperoning for the Page High School Band, volunteering with the PTSA, or crashing on the sofa reading, watching movies, playing video games, crocheting, or scrapbooking. She and her husband have two daughters and two cats.

Partner Spotlight: The Barnabas Network

You have probably heard about food banks, but what about a furniture bank? The Barnabas Network is a nonprofit furniture bank based right here in Guilford County.

“Barnabas started in 2005 as a grassroots response to natural disasters,” said Judy Caldwell, The Barnabas Network’s marketing and development manager. “Local faith groups, community-minded volunteers, and other organizations realized there was a gap in services here for folks starting over, resettling, fleeing violence, transitioning out of homelessness, or breaking the cycle of poverty.” The next year, the organization gained nonprofit status.

Caldwell noted that while service agencies were helping to find stable housing, furnishing these living spaces was frequently beyond a family’s means. “Today, we serve more than 2,700 people a year – about 800 to 1,000 families.”

The Barnabas Network collects new and gently-used furniture, about 8,000 pieces a year, from donors in the community. “We honor your well-loved items, those pieces of furniture that have reached the end of the road in your home but still have a lot of life left in them. We share them to help make a house a home for someone who is starting over.”

The Barnabas Network is moving into a new strategic planning phase of its work and has partnered with Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) as part of its Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Cohort II.

“We have bold visions in terms of expanding and becoming a national model and believe the work we’re doing with Ready Ready’s CQI process will help us capture the metrics around the impact we’re having. We were so thrilled to be chosen.” Caldwell said. “We have anecdotal evidence and some metrics to capture the impact, but having more data will help us become a teaching model for furniture banks in the United States and around the globe.”

Ready for School, Ready for Life Adds Strategies Focused on Children Ages 3-5

(Greensboro, N.C., October 13, 2022) – Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) has selected community partners to pilot strategies focused on families with children ages 3-5 in Guilford County. A design team of diverse community stakeholders from Guilford County developed ten strategies designed to improve services for these children and their families. Three strategies will be piloted starting this month:

● Implement a countywide active reading effort to improve children’s early literacy skills.

● Improve adult and children’s social-emotional development by expanding evidence-based interventions.

● Enhance the pre-K to kindergarten transition.

“We are excited to recognize our community partners as we add strategies for families with children ages 3-5 to our system-building work,” said Ready Ready CEO Charrise Hart. “By focusing on early literacy, the transition to kindergarten, and mental health for social-emotional development, we are building on the impact we’ve created by assessing needs for families with children prenatal to age 3. We want every child born in Guilford County in 2023 and beyond to enter kindergarten on track and find success in school by third grade, which is a critical milestone for their future.”

Ready Ready has selected these evidence-based programs and partner agencies for this important work:

Reading Connections will implement the Motheread/Fatheread curriculum with parents and caregivers who are strengthening their own literacy skills. This curriculum creates literacy-rich home environments and encourages shared reading between adults and children.

The United Way of Greater Greensboro will offer Raising a Reader through a collaboration with Guilford County School’s North Carolina Pre-kindergarten classrooms. Lessons learned from the pilot in the 2022-23 school year will inform the expansion of the program countywide to additional early childhood classrooms.

The Kellin Foundation will facilitate the Community Resiliency Model (CRM). This intervention can be used with families and other professionals, such as early childhood educators, to promote awareness of stress triggers and teach skills that can manage emotional reactions. There is a specific focus on the impact of trauma when implementing strategies to promote healthy reactions to stress.

Family Service of the Piedmont will implement Triple P – Positive Parenting Program – in one of Guilford County’s census tracts in High Point with high rates of poverty. Triple P offers a range of supports for families, ranging from general parenting education to interventions for specific social-emotional challenges children may experience.

The YWCA-High Point will conduct work with Parents as Teachers to enhance parent and caregiver skills around social-emotional development through home visits and group activities. By reaching families in the home, parent educators are able to provide support and education to families with a specific focus on preparing for kindergarten entry.

The research is clear – positive experiences earlier in life help children build a strong foundation and grow into socially and emotionally healthy kids who are confident and empathetic. Positive experiences early in children’s lives promote healthy physical development throughout the body. Negative experiences early in life can lead to long-term health problems such as high blood pressure, diabetes, heart disease, obesity, and mental health challenges.

“As a backbone organization, Ready Ready works with experienced community partners and evidence-based programs to expand and integrate services like these with the goal of ensuring more Guilford County families have access,” Hart said. “We are building a connected, innovative system of care to support families and their children from the very beginning. We cannot expect a healthier, more resilient, more prosperous community if we don’t invest in our future.”

About Ready for School, Ready for Life

Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization working to create a connected, innovative system of care for Guilford County’s youngest children and their families. Our goal is to build a replicable model to share across North Carolina and other states. Learn more at www.GetReadyGuilford.org.

Media contact: Stephanie Skordas, stephanies@getreadyguilford.org.