Opportunities July 1, 2010
Below are summaries of the available projects for the Stoneleigh Center Junior Fellowship program starting July 1, 2010.
ASAP/After School Activities Partnerships is a small, non-profit organization with the dual mission to 1) recruit volunteers and organizations to lead after school clubs to keep at-risk Philadelphia youth safe and active after school in an effort to decrease incidence of violence among unsupervised youth and 2) to disseminate to parents and others working with youth information on after school resources, including an annual directory of programs published in the Philadelphia Daily News and updated online. Now in its seventh year, ASAP is the fastest-growing provider of extended-day enrichment programs in Philadelphia, focusing on citywide initiatives in chess, Scrabble, dance, and yoga, among other activities. ASAP seeks a Stoneleigh Junior Fellow to assist with the creation of a data tracking and collection system with two purposes: 1) to track academic achievement, attendance, behavior, and demographics, which will guide ASAP's strategies and programming; and 2) to expand data collection efforts on other non-ASAP citywide after school programs to ensure a comprehensive annual directory. The fellowship award would be commensurate with education and experience.
Court Appointed Special Advocates of Philadelphia County (CASA) trains and supports community volunteers to advocate for the health, safety, stability and well-being of abused and neglected children. We seek to secure a Stoneleigh Junior Fellow to carry out a one-year project focused on assessing how CASA positively influences the lives of the children it serves. The Fellow will analyze available data, gather additional information through surveys, interviews and visits with child clients and their caregivers, produce reports documenting the child clients' experiences and evaluate statewide CASA organizations to compare programmatic similarities and differences that have proven to be effective. The Fellow will make recommendations to CASA, which will enhance practice and provide additional advocacy interventions aiming to help child clients have better outcomes in the child welfare system.
The Multiplying Connections Initiative, a program of the Health Federation of Philadelphia, is designed to improve access to and quality of health care services to underserved individuals and families. We have developed a set of core professional competencies which outline the essential knowledge, values, attitudes, and skills needed to create trauma informed systems of care for children and families. We seek a Stoneleigh Junior Fellow to map existing curricula in child welfare and children's behavioral health to these core competencies to determine which competencies are addressed in current mandated and non-mandated training provided to Philadelphia's children's services professionals. The Fellow will be responsible for analyzing and disseminating the results of the mapping process, including developing written recommendations for individual organizations regarding how their workforce activities can be enhanced to support trauma informed practice.
Public Citizens for Children and Youth (PCCY) is an organization seeking to improve the lives of children through thoughtful and informed advocacy. Many parents of young children are aware that their children are not developing as quickly as expected but are unsure of what to do about it. Although health providers may have recommended that the parent pursue early intervention services, and the services should be available because they are mandated, the system may well appear too complex and foreboding for them to access. Although the system is complex, governed by different rules and eligibilities and administered by different departments depending on the age of the child, PCCY seeks a Stoneleigh Junior Fellow to work with parents, providers and administrators to identify current accessibility routes and explore ways to improve them so that families can be assisted in securing the help their children need and ensuring continuity of access from infant-toddler programs to preschool age groups. With support from PCCY, the fellow would conduct formal and informal research, develop recommendations, issue a report and sponsor a forum at the end of the period and have laid significant groundwork for future advocacy based on the findings and recommendations.
The Pennsylvania Council of Children, Youth and Family Services (PCCYFS) Education and Professional Development Institute (EPDI) provides training for private child welfare agency staff that deliver mandated child welfare and community based prevention services to Philadelphia's most vulnerable children and their families. EPDI seeks a Stoneleigh Junior Fellow to participate in the development of a competency-based, service- specific training curricula for private agency case managers and social workers. Competency-based training systems are considered best practice for creating and maintaining a qualified child welfare workforce. The primary activity would be to develop curricula and outcome measurement instruments, including a transfer of learning protocol, to match the curriculum to the competencies identified. Additionally, the Fellow would co-author a paper describing this process for submission to conferences or journals.
People's Emergency Center (PEC), an organization that provides programs and services to and advocates for homeless families, seeks a Stoneleigh Junior Fellow to organize and lead a campaign to assess educational experiences of homeless students in the School District of Philadelphia. The Junior Fellow will manage Homeless Students Learning, a collaboration of homeless family service providers who will identify educational needs of homeless children and youth in Philadelphia. The Fellow will produce a comprehensive policy brief that identifies the challenges of serving homeless students and contains recommendations for improving educational services as proposed by school principles and counselors and homeless parents. The Junior Fellow will also develop and organize a communication strategy to publicize the results of the brief by organizing public forums and using other techniques. The goal of the fellowship is to institute improved policies that will benefit more than 600 homeless students.
The mission of the Philadelphia Education Fund (Ed Fund) is to improve the quality of public education for underserved youth throughout the greater Philadelphia region. In 2005, the Ed Fund conducted research with Johns Hopkins University that asked a simple question: how early in the middle grades can we identify students who are at risk for dropping out? We were astounded to learn that sixth graders in Philadelphia (and in six other cities where we have replicated our work) who do not attend regularly, receive poor behavior marks, or fail math or English have no more than a 10% chance of graduating on time and a 20% chance of graduating within five years. In a given year, between 1,000 and 2,000 sixth graders in Philadelphia have each of these risk factors. We have put our research into practice by creating a research-based, comprehensive dropout prevention/intervention model aimed at interrupting the pattern of failure among students who demonstrate these at-risk behaviors (attendance, behavior, course failure in math/English) in the middle grades. The Stoneleigh Junior Fellow will work with the Philadelphia Education Fund's Research Department to help us better understand the impact of our whole-school, targeted, and intensive supports. Specifically, the Fellow will link survey data we collect around the type, duration, and response to intervention to student academic and behavioral outcomes and thereby help determine which supports work best with which student populations with highly risk-specific needs. The work of the Fellow will help to inform the program design for expansion schools in Philadelphia as well as expansion sites in Los Angeles, Seattle, Detroit, San Antonio, Chicago, and New Orleans.
Research for Action seeks to improve the educational opportunities and outcomes for urban youth through research and advocacy. On a national scale, adolescents are underperforming on literacy assessments. The problems of adolescent literacy are nationwide, but urban and minority students are particularly at risk. Understanding what is needed to improve urban adolescents' literacy skills is important because low literacy skills translate into problems across content area subjects, and leave students underprepared for the expectations of college and careers. RFA seeks a Stoneleigh Junior Fellow interested in examining the issue of adolescent literacy locally and nationally. The Fellow will conduct in-depth qualitative research in two area high schools where promising literacy work with community partners is occurring - one in Philadelphia and one in Camden - to document the experiences of urban students who enter high school reading below grade level. At the same time, the Fellow will complete a national scan of evidence-based policies, programs and practices that are effectively addressing the literacy challenges of under-prepared urban and minority youth.
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