A Day to Celebrate
Dear Partners,
This is a special day for SVP that I wanted to stop and celebrate with you.
Six years ago, we made a commitment to ensure that all children would be ready for kindergarten as the foundation for their learning and life success. We did that not knowing HOW we would get there but knowing that we were smart, capable people who needed to focus our resources and passion for real impact. We have done good work over these years and today marks a very significant milestone on that journey.Later this morning, our community’s leaders from education, government, business, health, and grassroots nonprofits will gather for the first meeting of the Preschool for All Task Force. This will be the first of ten sessions to figure out how our community will provide access to quality preschool for every child in Multnomah County—a starting point that will ripple throughout our metro area and state.While I realize it’s just the beginning of this Task Force, it’s also a meaningful end to SVP’s groundwork building toward this day. We have continued to do the investing and capacity building work with nonprofits that is our trademark. In fact, we have invested almost $1 million in grants, $2.2 million worth of volunteer talent, and brought along $7.8 million in additional cash to these nonprofits serving young children and families. These are critical investments that have grown the capacity, vision, and courage of these nonprofits. But they also made clear to us that working to grow their capacity alone would not solve the problem because funding was scarce to do what was needed for kids and barriers existed that they could not knock down alone.
We stepped into this challenge for more structural change in our community with courage to face the unknown and curiosity about where we could help. It started with our co-leadership of the Ready for Kindergarten Collaborative in 2012 that established a “big WE” that could make change together. That morphed into a role of researching, strategizing, and engaging the community around what structural change would yield the most positive results for underserved kids. This is a role that no one holds in the community and yet fits our strengths in building willingness capacity for change.
It became crystal clear that providing a structured, quality preschool or preschool-like experience for our most underserved kids would be a game-changer for our community. By our estimates, only 4,000 of the 18,000 children have such an experience now. This data, the research we have gathered and authored, and the grassroots and parent voice we have helped to clarify and bring forward stirred the imagination and will of Multnomah County Commissioner Jessica Vega Pederson to take up this mantle of Preschool for All.Commissioner Vega Pederson’s has invited me to serve as Vice Chair of this county task force in recognition of our Partnership's servant leadership on this issue so far and the role that we must play next to secure the goal. I am excited and humbled to play this role on behalf of our Partnership. Our Partners have moved this forward all these years and are now poised to serve on the Task Force subcommittees to recommend how we will provide preschool for all.
This is virgin territory for an SVP affiliate and a great achievement for us. It shows our abiding commitment to the Ready for Kindergarten goal. It demonstrates our commitment to advancing equity and to amplifying the voices of our Community Partners. It has sharpened our role as investors and capacity builders and exposed new strengths in policy advocacy.I will keep you updated about the progress of the Preschool for All Task Force or you can track it yourself here: Preschool for All Task Force.
I close another long note of celebration with appreciation and an invitation. I am grateful to the many people that have tilled the soil on this structural change effort. Many staff and Partners have invested countless hours and brainpower to this. Many have invested over and above your base Partnership gift to ensure that we had the money to drive structural change. You know who you are and I am grateful to you.
My invitation: your staff and I always appreciate hearing feedback and questions from you. Reply here with a “whoop whoop,” a thought about this milestone, a question about something I haven’t addressed, or an encouragement to continue this painstaking work to change the game for kids and our community.
My thanks for all you do.
In partnership,
Mark
PS. I also want you who are interested in our impact beyond Multnomah County to know that we are not working with blinders on. We will continue working to leverage this effort for neighboring counties and the state.