out-of-school time

Initiatives in education at the Richmond, Virginia, United Way, “The quality of your program dictates the
amount of youth engagement, whether they show up.” Laura LaFuente, Director, Target Graduation at
the Austin, Texas, United Way agreed: “If what you are looking for is a babysitter, that’s one thing, but if
you are looking for a quality program, that’s another.”
And, while it is easy to simply say that quality is important, it is yet another thing to be able to show where
individual programs are succeeding and where they can improve. Before these initiatives, according to
the United Way coordinators interviewed for this report, many programs relied on instinct when it came
to determining their impact. Or, they saw the prospect as so daunting that they shied away from it. In
this initiative, community members and out-of-school time stakeholders looked at outcome measures
across a set of multiple programs using a consistent approach. This provided a baseline that could be
tracked over time and also helped identify variations in quality.
However, these United Ways report, as programs began to look closely at their own practices and to
connect those to evidence of impact, light bulbs began to go off. Gallo, in Asheville, described hearing
about how important it was “just for people to know what indicators of a quality program were. ‘Just
knowing this, I can start to change my practice,’ they would say to me.”
Katherine Rivard, the Community Impact Manager of the United Way of Greater Kansas City, described
the transformative effect that focusing on quality can have:
At one [program] site, they told us a wonderful story: “When you move to a quality
model, the kids begin to decide many of the activities. It is much more youth-directed.
That was very scary for our staff at first. Many people are trained on a care model,
adult-driven. But this is youth-driven. Once we made the shift (which took months),
we were amazed because enrollment increased and youth were telling their peers,
‘You really ought to come to this, it’s so cool,’ which is by far the best advertising.
Parents were saying to their kids that they were ready to quit paying for afterschool
programs, that the kids had gotten old enough not to need them, but the kids wanted
to continue.”
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