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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.

Staff profile: Connie Colter

Ready for School, Ready for Life Parent Liaison Connie Colter came to our organization through the Guilford Parent Leader Network (GPLN) and its Community Organizing and Family Issues (COFI)training.

“I empower families to make a difference within Guilford County and also offer them support,” Colter said. “I build one-on-one relationships with GPLN families and encourage other families in Guilford County to join our group. It’s so important to have a support system as a parent.”

They say if you want something done, ask a busy person to do it. Colter is currently earning her degrees in special education and criminal justice while parenting five children and working at Ready Ready. Her long-term goal is to provide quality education to juvenile delinquents by starting a school for them. She intends to get to the root of the problem instead of watching them get passed along the system.

“Once they have the label ‘juvenile delinquent’, it sticks with them for the rest of their educational life,” Colter said. “These children don’t receive the standard quality of education and this causes a greater issue. What would happen if we took the time to understand the root of why they may have lashed out or committed a crime and help them work past it?”

Colter says her interest in education and social justice comes from her mother’s 30-year career working with children who have exceptional needs. “Growing up learning not to judge people, but looking beyond what society may say about them is so important,” Colter said. “I learned to give back and treat people how you’d want to be treated if you were in their shoes.”

When she’s not studying, writing and submitting papers, parenting, or creating a support network for Guilford County Parents, Colter likes to paint, cook, and plan events. She’s an especially big fan of celebrating people’s birthdays.

Partner Spotlight: Out of the Garden Project

Out of the Garden Project began as a family project to help solve food insecurity for six to ten families at Morehead Elementary School fourteen years ago. Now each month, more than 800 volunteers collect food, sort it in the warehouse, create packages for families, and deliver packages to schools and other locations.

Additionally, more than 3,000 families in the Piedmont-Triad are served each month through the organization’s Fresh Mobile Markets – free mobile food pantries that distribute about 65 pounds of fresh produce, bread, meat, and shelf-stable items to families in more than 25 locations in Guilford and neighboring counties. The markets are for families with children 0-18 years of age who must qualify to receive the food.

“It’s literally like a grocery store on wheels,” said Executive Director and President Don Milholin. “We want to help the whole person, the whole family. It’s a chance for people to have dignity in having food they can take home and gather around their table.”

In addition to the Fresh Mobile Markets and a 17,500-foot warehouse at The Church on 68, Out of the Garden has created a shared-use kitchen so food entrepreneurs can make low-risk packaged food to sell and an urban teaching farm. Originally located in downtown Greensboro, the farm has moved to McCleansville, where more crop acreage is available. A USDA grant for innovation will allow the organization to increase its harvest, which will be sold to create more funding for the organization and its projects.

Out of the Garden partners with Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) in several ways, but the most recent is participation in our Continuous Quality Improvement process.

“We’re excited about the CQI process and just getting started in the work,” said Beth Crise, director of development and operations, “We’re thinking about how we can put policies and procedures in place at the urban teaching farm to improve communication and become more and more successful. We can also streamline volunteer operations in our warehouse to rotate food in and out more efficiently to better serve families.”

“We believe we’re the most influential food partnership in the Piedmont and the largest non-governmental agency not affiliated directly with Feeding America in the area,” Milholin said. “Our mission isn’t just to give out food. Our mission is to provide stepping stones out of poverty.”

Out of the Garden will soon open a store at The Market Shoppes on Sandy Ridge Road to sell produce grown at the urban teaching farm. “We’re growing cabbage collards, raising chickens to sell eggs, and planting strawberries for next spring,” Milholin said. “We’re focused on creating a community where no one goes hungry.”

The Duke Endowment visits Ready Ready

The Duke Endowment Trustees, Ready for School, Ready for Life Board of Directors and staff gathered on August 29, 2022 for a site visit focused on the early childhood ecosystem. The Duke Endowment Trustees learned how children’s lives are affected by their different environments and how systems and organizations impact their development directly and indirectly, and what Ready Ready as a backbone organization is doing about it.

Panel discussions featured experts from organizations such as Family Connects, HealthySteps, Nurse-Family Partnership, Community Navigation, Guilford County Schools, Guilford County Government, Children’s Home Society, Bringing Out the Best, United Way of Greater Greensboro, shift_ed, Every Baby Guilford, Cone Health, N.C. General Assembly, N.C. A&T State University, the Foundation for a Healthy High Point, Duke University, and the Guilford County Health Department.

Please enjoy this photo gallery of the day’s events. Photo credit: Elizabeth Larson Photography

Partner Spotlight: Reading Connections

One in five people in Guilford County struggles with basic literacy skills. Reading Connections transforms our community by improving literacy and promoting educational equity for people of all ages.

“We’ve been in operation for more than 30 years and started as a way to provide extra literacy support for adults, but now it’s grown into much, much more,” said Alison Welch, Reading Connections family literacy manager. “We started the Family Literacy program in 2006 and work with parents, caregivers, and their children. We want to help parents know how they can support their children in becoming ready for kindergarten.”

Welch made the point that literacy is cyclical – which is why Reading Connections takes a multigenerational approach and partners with organizations like Ready for School, Ready for Life.

Reading Connections plans to enroll 150 families in its Guilford County program this year. In the 2020-21 academic year, 68 percent of the parents in the program reported reading more to their children, which is key to breaking the cycle of illiteracy.

“Research shows that children who start kindergarten behind their peers are less likely to experience success in school and read on grade level by third grade,” Welch said. “Working with Ready Ready and its program The Guilford Basics helps us explain to parents that early brain development is critical for future success in school.”

Reading Connections’ Family Literacy program provides six 15-week sessions during the school year at Title 1 elementary schools and community centers in Guilford County. Because parents are their children’s first teachers, the program incorporates literacy instruction for adults and children.

“A lot of the strategies included in The Basics Guilford are also included in the Motheread Fatheread curriculum we use in our program,” Welch said. “Encouraging parents to be actively engaged when reading with their kids, letting children turn the pages, repeating key phrases, or pointing at pictures are good examples. We had a Ready Ready staff member give a training in The Basics and Active Reading with our parents and loved how she emphasized that you don’t have to be reading the words on the page to engage your child in a story.”

Ready for School, Ready for Life Awards Continuous Quality Improvement Grants

The grants help organizations improve to better serve Guilford County families.

(Greensboro, N.C., August 25, 2022) – Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) has awarded $652,000 in grants to programs from 13 organizations serving families in Guilford County to participate in its second cohort of the Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) process. Ready Ready has partnered with The Duke Endowment and the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work on these grants to make participating in the CQI Cohort II financially possible.

“CQI is a team-based process of collecting, analyzing, and using data to improve service quality. This data helps identify efficiency, effectiveness, performance, and outcomes to provide the resources our community needs,” said Ready Ready CEO Charrise Hart. “We are glad to have such a good response from community partners who want to be involved in Ready Ready’s system-building work.”

To date, Ready Ready has had 13 programs complete CQI training. Four more are currently participating in a cohort process. CQI Cohort II launches in September 2022 and will wrap up in March 2023. The CQI Cohort II programs are:

Backpack Beginnings
The Barnabas Network
The Center for New North Carolinians
Children and Families First (formerly Guilford Child Development)
Greensboro Housing Authority
GuilfordWorks
The Kellin Foundation
Out of the Garden Project
Positive Direction for Youth and Families
Room at the Inn
Triad Goodwill
Women’s Resource Center of Greensboro
YWCA Greensboro

Each program will dedicate 3-4 team members who will participate in monthly learning sessions with other programs and CQI facilitators from the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work. Between sessions, team members will complete assignments and receive coaching from their facilitators.

“Through this work, programs will build their capacity to apply a CQI framework,” said Jacqueline McCracken, Ready Ready’s vice president for strategic impact. “This work is focused on the Model for Improvement, a powerful and flexible method that promotes a structured process for experiential learning.”

Through the CQI process, the programs will build the capacity to use program data to identify challenges or opportunities for improvement related to family experience or satisfaction. Through experiential learning, programs will gain the tools they need to generate higher performance-building capacity while serving Guilford County families and children.

“Every child deserves a great start in life, but not every child starts from the same place,” Hart said. “By using this process, the organizations in CQI Cohort II will be able to enhance the important work they are doing to assist Guilford County families with the resources, support, and information they need to give their youngest children a strong foundation for success in school and life.”

Media contact: Stephanie Skordas, Director of Marketing & Communications, stephanies@getreadyguilford.org or 336.579.2977 ext. 2015

Partner Spotlight: March of Dimes

The March of Dimes leads the fight for the health of all moms and babies. The organization supports research, leads programs, and provides education and advocacy so every family can have the best possible start.

Nationally, the organization partners with similar nonprofits on advocacy issues such as Medicaid expansion and other programs that support maternal and infant health. In North Carolina, the partnerships hit even closer to home.

“We are proud to partner with Every Baby Guilford as part of the Guilford County Health Department and the effort to reduce maternal and infant mortality,” said Michaela Penix, director of maternal infant health for the March of Dimes in North Carolina. “We want everyone to understand that becoming pregnant does not magically make you healthy.”

Another March of Dimes project, in conjunction with the local American Heart Association, Every Baby Guilford, and Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready), aims to raise awareness about how health impacts moms and babies. In response to the high rates of infant mortality in Guilford County, Trusted Spaces, Healthy Babies is a collaboration between these four organizations to form an innovative approach that aims to address the drivers of infant mortality while empowering mothers of Color in trusted community spaces. Programs such as Trusted Spaces, Healthy Babies support mothers and contribute to raising healthy, smart babies.

“We are equipping barbers and stylists in Guilford County with health information they can share with their customers, train them to talk with their peers or clients, and share statistics and information, so they are like a patient navigator,” Penix said. “We want them to know about community resources offering primary care services and talk with their clients about their health while cutting and styling their hair.”

Penix says the program is a natural fit for barber shops and hair salons since stylists and barbers develop relationships that foster intimate conversations. “My beautician is somewhat of a therapist for me,” Penix shared, “Many people have similar relationships. We want to make sure the barbers and stylists have accurate health information and can dispel myths about heart health and pregnancy. Their encouragement to a client to get a checkup or check their blood pressure can impact the health of our community.”

As part of Trusted Spaces, Healthy Babies, The Basics Guilford will provide bookshelves and books for young children in the barber shops and salons. Those book nooks will be installed this summer.

“The barbers and beauticians have been so incredible and excited to do their part in making their community healthy,” Penix said. “There are so many studies that have supported the use of barbers and beauticians as peer educators and an effective means to help reduce the rates of HIV, increase the rates of condom usage, breast cancer screenings, barbers and beauticians have been made making it happen for decades. And so, for them to know that they are part of an effective strategy and they are being highlighted as champions, they’re thrilled.”

The Cemala Foundation has provided a one-year $67,000 grant to these four organizations for Trusted Spaces, Healthy Babies in Guilford County.

Partner Spotlight: Greensboro Bound

Greensboro Bound’s vision is to bring outstanding writers of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, young adult, and children’s books to our community and into our schools. While it may be best known for the annual Greensboro Bound Literary Festival, the organization’s efforts to connect authors and Guilford County Schools students are highly praised.

“We find local authors, North Carolina authors, and diverse authors and bring these authors virtually now to our students,” said Natalie Strange, Director of Library Media Services at Guilford County Schools and a member of Greensboro Bound’s leadership team. “We also provide books for our school libraries that accompany these author visits.”

Guilford County students have the opportunity to read the text, then submit questions to the author. During the virtual visit, the author and students have great conversations about the topics, themes, and more. Greensboro Bound also creates lesson plans with each title so school library media coordinators can incorporate them.

Traditionally, these author visits have been offered to students in kindergarten through grade 12. But in the 2021-22 school year, a partnership with Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) helped create a new opportunity for children in Pre-K.“Working with our early learning department, we figured out a way to structure these visits for younger students and pre-readers,” Strange said. “We created shorter videos, incorporated songs, explored the story, and let them see what it’s like to talk with an author.”

The book they chose was Laundry Day by Jessixa Bagley. It’s about two bored badgers who get a little carried away while helping their mother.

“Students got hands-on learning by sorting different types of socks and using clothespins to put them on a laundry line, ” Strange said. “Thanks to Ready Ready, each student was given a copy of the book to take home. We knew it made a lasting impression when one of our students came in for book character day, and she had pinned old clothes, baby clothes, and socks on herself so she could be a character from that book.”

Strange said the lesson plans could also be used for Pre-K students in the 2022-23 school year since the author permitted the videos to be used again and again. “The students build a relationship with the author and the text, so now these characters have true meaning to them. It’s the beginning of a partnership that will continue to bring support for our young students as they become readers.”