Category: staff profile

Vice President of Strategic Impact Jacqueline McCracken joined Ready for School, Ready for Life(Ready Ready) in February 2022 and has recently celebrated her first anniversary. In her role, she oversees and manages Ready Ready’s priority areas of data and performance, integrateddata system and the network. The latter is comprised of navigation, prenatal to three strategies, continuous quality improvement and community alignment.

“I collaborate with community stakeholders and leaders to advance building the system of care for young children and families,” McCracken said. “Even before I began working at Ready Ready, I was interested in how this work creates short and long-term impacts for individuals and our community. My family has also personally benefited from the expansion of the evidence-based programs Ready Ready has supported as a backbone organization.”

McCracken said Ready Ready’s role as a backbone organization is underscored by its structure as a startup nonprofit. “Being part of the building phase is an area where I think I can contribute the most,” she said. “Everything is brand new, and nothing like this exists yet. It’s exciting to put processes, protocols, and measures in place, building momentum and energizing people about a vision.”

McCracken said the startup energy she enjoys at work reminds her of a giant puzzle and making all the pieces fit. That may be one of the reasons she’s turned to detective stories in her spare time.

“Adding non-work related reading back into my normal routine has been fun. I’ve been working my way through Michael Connolly’s Lincoln Lawyer series,” McCracken said. Additionally, she likes reading to her four-year-old son and being physically active.

“My number one priority is family. I also prioritize my health. I like to lift weights and walk outdoors,” she said. “I typically try to get a walk in every day. Just thirty minutes works wonders for my energy and mental clarity.“

Coretta Walker joined Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) as Project Manager: Ages 3-5 in May 2022. In her role, she’s responsible for building the infrastructure and processes for the next stage of Ready Ready’s work to shift outcomes for Guilford County children and their families.

“It’s an exciting time to be at Ready Ready,” Walker said. “Enormous work has been done to establish the foundation for Guilford County families with children prenatal to age three. Now we are building on that progress to make sure children born beginning January 1, 2023, have the services in place to be prepared for kindergarten.”

Walker explains her work at Ready Ready as removing barriers to ensure every child in Guilford County is ready for kindergarten and on target to read proficiently in third grade.

“This is deeply personal for me. I’m a mother of two daughters who are three and eight,” Walker said. “I’m passionate about Guilford County and serving my community to ensure we all have access to the best life.”

Walker volunteers in the community through organizations like the Junior League of Greensboro, McLeansville Elementary’s PTO, and Mt. Zion Baptist Church. She is also a member of Delta Sigma Theta, a historically Black sorority. 

With two children active in the arts community and volunteer work on her calendar, Walker still makes time for other important interests.

“I love monograms and football with the same amount of passion and fervor,” Walker shared. “I love watching Carolina football – that’s University of National Champions, by the way. I’m also a Carolina Panthers fan, which has been a hard road for the past couple of years. I watch football at our house from Thursday to Monday with my husband and daughters. It’s an institution.”

Walker has been a dancer for 18 years and has performed at all levels: competition, college, and as a teacher. She brings that energy and enthusiasm to her work and personal life, along with an appreciation for staying hydrated. It might be why her tumbler collection is a longtime passion. 

“I have more than 50 Starbucks cups in all sizes and colors. I use one to two every day for water and iced coffee. If I’m feeling fancy, they match my outfit, and they also help create seasonal spirit,” she said. “I am the person who believes in all things bright – bright energy, bright color.”

Kelli Crawford joined Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) as Continuous Quality Improvement Manager earlier this year. Previously, Kelli served as the Director of Impact at Junior Achievement of the Triad. In that role, she built relationships with school districts, educators, and volunteers across five counties to inspire and prepare young people to succeed in a global economy.

Overseeing the Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) program allows Crawford to connect with Guilford County programs that focus on serving families with young children.

“As someone who’s a lifelong learner and focuses on ways to grow and improve, working with these programs to help them increase their efficiency, quality, and service is a natural fit,” Crawford said.

The CQI process uses the Model for Improvement, a powerful and flexible method promoting a structured experiential learning approach. The 13 organizations in CQI Cohort II began their work in September and will finish the process in May 2023.  Their team-based work will help them collect, analyze, and use data to improve service quality.

“We’re working with three to four team members in each organization,” Crawford said. “Each month, the programs participate in learning sessions with each other and CQI facilitators from the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work and Population Health Improvement Partners. The CQI members receive additional coaching between sessions and have time to complete any assignments.”

When she’s not helping local organizations create new ways to improve, Crawford says she enjoys spending time in nature and expanding her photography skills. She and her husband are avid campers and enjoy exploring North Carolina, from the mountains to the beaches.

“My husband’s family introduced me to camping, and I fell in love with it, too,” Crawford said. “During the pandemic, we bought a small camper to continue exploring and find safe ways to continue our travels.”

While camping in North Carolina allows for quick getaways, a recent trip to Grand Teton National Park and Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming inspired Crawford’s photography. “I’ve used some of the photos I took there in my office to remind me of that trip,” she said. “It’s a great way to bring the outdoors indoors.”

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.

Network Director Stormi Covington joined Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) in July 2019. She was familiar with Ready Ready’s mission from a previous role at Greensboro Housing Authority. “After I left the agency, I saw the position open at Ready Ready and I’ve been here ever since.”

Covington’s work at Ready Ready includes working with community partners, systems, and individuals to align services in Guilford County. She put it simply, “I’m a connector.”

Covington researches programs for connections with her godson P.J. in mind. He was born a week after she started her career at Ready Ready. “Researching programs for children ages 0-3 came naturally for me as I watched P.J. grow and develop. Now we are expanding our work for children ages 3-5 and he’s right in that sweet spot.”

Much of Covington’s work at Ready Ready focuses on finding gaps in services and identifying solutions. She and her team have built an Agency Finder database with contact information and up to 40 data points for Ready Ready’s Integrated Data System. It will allow proven program staff members to seamlessly help families connect with the resources, information, and support they need. A version is also available to the general public by way of the Community Portal.

“My friends are surprised when I say I started with a spreadsheet,” Covington said. “My nonprofit colleagues understand that some areas of Guilford County have more resources than others, and not everyone has the same access. When it comes to navigating all these resources, it can take a lot of strategies to figure out what’s offered and what you need as a parent.”

One thing Covington recommends to all parents is The Basics Guilford. “When P.J. came along, I started talking with his parents, my friends, about The Basics. I taught them what I had learned and encouraged them to utilize them right from the start. It’s been amazing to see P.J. grow and develop.”

By Stephanie Skordas, Director of Marketing and Communications

“We started out as a very small team. I think I was the fourth person to join,” said Christina Dobson, Director of Data and Performance. “And now Ready Ready is nearly five times larger in terms of staff.”

The growth comes with Ready for School, Ready for Life’s ability to develop the infrastructure needed to create population-level change, according to Dobson. Before joining Ready Ready in 2017, Dobson started volunteering at the YWCA as a mentor to a pregnant teen at the same time she was pregnant with her second child.

“As I continued to volunteer and then work there for 18 years, my own children grew to be teens, and I could see at close range how my children’s experiences and opportunities were different from those of, first, the children of the young mothers I worked with, and later of the moms themselves. It provided a very clear picture of inequity and systemic racism, and I am so grateful to have the opportunity to work against that at the community level at Ready Ready,” she said.

In April 2022, Dobson transitioned into her new role as Director of Data and Performance focused on one of Ready Ready’s six priorities – conduct rigorous evaluation and build sustainability for system-building work. She will support staff and community partners in readiness for the evaluation of our initiative, coordinating with The Duke Endowment and Ready Ready’s evaluation consultants.

“I’ll be assuring that our evaluation can happen in a way that is seamless for our staff and partners,” Dobson said. “I’m excited about being a liaison between our evaluation partners and various stakeholders to make sure we have access to the data that will measure outcomes and performance.”

In her spare time, Dobson enjoys reading general fiction but has a more specialized niche these days. “My husband Dave has transitioned from his 24 years as a professor at Guilford College and is now writing full time and involved in game development. I’m the first reader of all his writing. I just finished reading his sixth novel which was a thriller, and some of his other works have been science fiction and fantasy. It’s so great to be involved this way.”