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Recap- Any Given Child DC: Year-End Convening

Submitted by: Elisabeth Orengo, Community Engagement Intern, DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative June 12, 2019

A special thanks to everyone who attended the 2019 Any Given Child DC (AGC DC) Convening on Tuesday, June 11, 2019! This year-end convening was an internal working meeting for AGC DC committee members to learn about the individual committee’s activities and the Implementation year two plans.

This summer the DC Collaborative and AGC DC Steering Committee will be updating the committee action steps, solidifying a schedule for next year and conducting outreach for next year’s participation! View the meeting recap below. Questions? Contact [email protected].

Meeting Resources

Agenda

Any Given Child DC, Vision, Values and Goals

PowerPoint

Committee Descriptions

DC Collaborative/ Committee Roles

Meeting Welcome and States of Arts Education

A huge thank you to our host, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and David Markey in particular, who is a co-chair of the Capacity Building Committee and Fundraising Subcommittee. The DC Commission was one of the founders of the DC Collaborative and we appreciate their continued partnership in this collective impact work.

DC Commission’s (CAH) Executive Director Terrie Rouse Rosario and Deputy Director Michael Bigley, welcomed the AGC committee members and shared the CAH FY18 annual report (link).

Lissa Rosenthal-Yoffe, Executive Director of the DC Collaborative, then reviewed the agenda for the convening before to passing it off to Jeanette McCune, who gave an overview of the national perspectives of The Kennedy Center’s Ensuring the Arts for Any Given Child (AGC) program. 

National Perspectives

A collective impact program of The Kennedy Center, Ensuring the Arts for Any Given Child (AGC) was launched 10 years ago, with it’s first site in Sacramento, California, and now involves 27 different communities. Although AGC’s collective impact model works across the nation, it is driven by the needs of the each community during strategic planning and implementation. Jeanette McCune highlighted the factor that makes DC unique among the 26 other sites, is the fact that the DC Collaborative, a collective impact organization, already existed when the AGC DC strategic planning work began in the 2017-2018 school year. AGC is a tool to implement collective impact strategies locally, and an organization like the DC Collaborative is sometimes an outcome for other communities.

Jeanette then discussed her time at the FSG’s Collective Impact Forum. FSG’s mission “to create a more equitable and sustainable future” was a source of inspiration for collective impact in the arts education field and Any Given Child in particular. Her main takeaway from the convening was that it is vital to gather, understand and effectively use information on “lived experiences” to drive change. 

Local Update

Lissa Rosenthal-Yoffe provided an update for Any Given Child DC and described the DC Collaborative’s role as an early collective impact organization. AGC DC’s planning and implementation activities is the the work of the Collaborative and greater arts and humanities education landscape. We are excited that the community remains deeply committed to making arts education accessible for all DC students and will work together to align resources to ensure that we are reaching everyone together.

Committee Scope of Work

EQUITY/ ACCESS COMMITTEE  (Co-chairs: Jeanette McCune, The Kennedy Center; Michelle Hoffmann, Washington Performing Arts)

Michelle Hoffmann read through the Equity and Access Committee’s goal, developed by AGC DC in the 2017-2018 strategic planning year: 

“Eliminate barriers in order to ensure equity in arts education for all students.” 

The committee’s first step this year was to create a Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) statement to guide the work of AGC DC internally and act as an exemplar to the community. Over the course of 3 meetings, committee members scanned other DEI statements from city agencies, other non-profits, arts and cultural organizations, chambers of commerce and foundations. 

The committee aimed to draft a statement that connects to the mission and values of AGC DC, define diversity, equity and inclusion; gives local context about the inequities residents currently face; and discuss equity as a practice that our community is constantly learning and evolving from. Generating tools to build an equitable and empowered society is an ongoing process guided by mutual trust, respect and humility. 

This statement will guide the work of AGC internally and will be an exemplar for other arts and cultural organizations in the District. The DEI statement is open for comment from AGC DC members through June 28. The DC Collaborative would like to share the equity statement with all members at the Annual Meeting in September. This statement will also be adopted by the DC Collaborative board

CAPACITY BUILDING COMMITTEE (David Markey, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities; Nathan Diamond, The Kennedy Center)

The Capacity Building Committee had three meetings March-June. David Markey and Nathan Diamond decided to divide the upcoming work into two pieces, starting with professional development programs for classroom school-based educators and arts specialists and teaching artists. The capacity building committee will conduct a gap analysis to get an accurate picture of the current professional development landscape. Additionally they detailed two professional development institutes, one occurring August 27-28 for teaching artists at National Building Museum and one tentatively scheduled for September 21 for school-based educators.

The capacity building committee addressed that they would be waiting for one more year to address student programming. 

ASSESSMENT/EVALUATION COMMITTEE (Anthony Setari, UMass-Lowell and DC Collaborative Consultant; Trisha Taylor, Washington Performing Arts)

The Assessment/ Evaluation Committee is working on three main projects:

Collection of assessment tools of arts organizations to determine the current state of assessment used by the community

Developing a shared measurement SEL tool to be used by arts organizations

Developing a logic model and evaluation plan for AGC DC 

Trisha discussed that the committee will be collecting assessment tools used by arts organizations in DC. All of the tools will be kept confidential and will be used internally to inform the work of the committee. 

Anthony reviewed early draft of an item matrix that will be used to develop a shared measurement tool exploring the impact of arts and social emotional learning (SEL). The committee is basing the tool on CASEL SEL criteria, because DCPS utilizes CASEL for their SEL work. 

The assessment committee will begin to develop a logic model with co-chairs of the other committees.

COMMUNICATIONS COMMITTEE (JR Russ, National LGBT Task Force)

JR highlighted that the work of the communications committee will be ramping up this coming year. There was a delayed start as the other committees solidified their scope of work.

Some Communications Committee priorities for the upcoming school year:

Assist in recruiting a co-chair and additional community members, as JR will be transitioning from a co-chair to a Communications Committee member

Work with the Collaborative’s consultant at Deloitte to develop a communications strategy for AGC DC

Internal AGC DC communications- The Committee’s role will be largely for the external AGC DC communications. The DC Collaborative will work closely with the Communications Committee to improve internal communications among committees so our overall AGC DC work is less siloed. There will be a communications liaison on each committee that will work with the Collaborative to report out on their committee’s activities.

STUDENT/ PARENT ADVISORY COMMITTEE

(Katherine Custer, DC Collaborative; Joanne Lamparter, Imagination Stage; Tracey Wyton, DC Collaborative)

The committee co-chairs up shared activities from two meetings. The main focus of the committee is to determine a structure for how to utilize student and and parent voice in AGC DC. To better understand students needs, the committee drafted a student needs assessment and parent survey with the aim of determining the awareness and participation in arts activities currently and what support is needed from the community in the future. The aim is to distribute the surveys in the fall and have a student focused convening by December.

FUNDRAISING SUBCOMMITTEE (Lissa Rosenthal-Yoffe, DC Collaborative and David Markey, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities)

Lissa and David shared that the formal fundraising work will begin as we develop specific AGC DC activities. The committee is now in the relationship building phase. They discussed a meeting with the Cafritz Foundation program officer and plans to engage Washington Regional Association of Grantmakers (WRAG) Children, Youth and Families working group, to involve the philanthropic community in AGC DC’s implementation. The Committee’s aim is to inform funders (including the Commission on the Arts and Humanities and the private sector) to developing grant opportunities that are reflective of the needs of the community.