Laying the Foundation for Success
Written by Kelly Starkey, Juntos Scaling Team Lead.
In May, a team of SVP Partners and volunteers was formed to partner with Latino Network staff and explore the ways in which Juntos Aprendemos—their early childhood program—could be scaled. Juntos Aprendemos prepares low‐income Spanish‐speaking children for success in kindergarten through classes that promote their cognitive, social, emotional and physical development, while in parent classes their mothers and fathers learn effective ways to support their children’s learning.
Started in 2000, Juntos has grown organically to 7 schools within the Portland School District, and serves 150 preschool aged children in their weekly program. The challenge they face is that there is considerable unmet need in our own community. There are approximately 55 schools in Multnomah County alone that have a 20% of greater Hispanic population, and would benefit from their programs and services.
With ten SVP Partners and volunteers now engaged on this project, working closely with the Juntos and Latino Network staff, we have made great strides in building the foundation to scale the program. Our first two initiatives have been to document and codify the current program, and to identify and interview other similar programs that could provide insight into the opportunities and challenges of scaling.
Specifically, SVP Partner Noelle Studer-Spevak worked with Program Director Sadie Feibel and her team to develop a comprehensive overview of the Juntos program. This not only documented specific details of the program for our team, it also provides a single source for Latino Network to refer to when writing grants and responding to requests for information. It is exciting to see all of the hard work and ingenuity of the Juntos and Latino Network teams consolidated in a way that can be more easily shared with the world. This living document forms the foundation for our business plan development, which is inspiring to see come together.
While Noelle and Sadie have been working through the details of the program, SVP volunteer Megan Loeb has taken on the task of not only finding other programs we can learn from, but also conducting interviews and research. Megan has identified both best practices and cautionary tales from other organizations that have scaled successfully. This benchmarking is critical to avoid challenges and to uncover secrets to success. Megan continues to help the team understand how other programs work, and how we can best identify communities and schools that are ready for a program like Juntos.
This is just the tip of the iceberg for building a truly scalable model for Juntos, and ultimately, to building a framework for future scaling projects for SVP. We have enlisted the help of SVP volunteer Elena Diamond, Assistant Professor at Lewis and Clark College, and her graduate students to find research studies and publications that provide empirical support for the foundational principles behind Juntos and why it is so successful. This will aid in grant writing as well as building community support for new schools.Our next step is to begin to outline possible scaling models with the help of Bob Tate, a brand new SVP Partner, who has jumped in with both feet on this project. Bob joins the bigger team of Partners, each playing a unique and valuable role in this partnership. This includes:
Holly Levow - Lead Partner
Val Ilsley - Lead Strategic Advisor
Monique Breault - Leadership Development
Wendy Weissman - HR
Mark Fulop - Strategic Planning
Lou Jaffe - Financial Advisor
Rob Dodson - Encore Fellow
Jill Farrow - Risk Management
Anonymous Partner - Operations Planning
Kelly Starkey - Juntos Scaling Team Lead
Noelle Studer-Spevak - Juntos in a Box
Megan Loeb - Benchmarking
Elena Diamond - Evaluation
Bob Tate - Scaling Business Plan
We are incredibly fortunate to have a Partnership so deeply talented and broadly knowledgeable to support the Juntos team and this scaling project specifically.