The Wallace Foundation announced that it is awarding a grant of up to $765,000 to the Jacksonville Children’s Commission to strengthen efforts to provide poor, urban children with more high-quality after-school programs.
The commission provides funding for 64 after-school programs that serve more than 10,000 children daily.
It will use the grant to make more programs available by working with municipal agencies, schools, nonprofit programs and other institutions vital to providing these services, according to the foundation.
The commission will coordinate the work over four years and focus on two areas — gathering reliable data and improving program quality.
“This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to bring all after-school programs in our city together to establish uniform quality standards and enhanced data collection,” said commission Executive Director Linda Lanier in a news release.
“We’ll work with all of youth-serving partner agencies to bring about better after-school experiences for more children across our city,” she said.
Wallace is a national foundation based in New York. Its mission is to support and share “effective ideas and practices that expand learning and enrichment opportunities for children.” More information is available at www.wallacefoundation.org.
“Research tells us that more children and teens can get access to high-quality after-school experiences when communities coordinate the work of the many different groups involved,” said Nancy Devine, Wallace director of communities, in the news release.
Wallace chose nine cities for the initiative. In addition to Jacksonville, it chose Baltimore, Denver, Fort Worth, Grand Rapids, Louisville, Nashville, Philadelphia and St. Paul, which it said were cities where at least half of public school students qualify for free or reduced-price lunch.
The nine new grants are the second phase of an initiative Wallace began in 2003 in Boston, Chicago, New York, Providence and Washington, D.C., to help cities better coordinate after-school programs to improve opportunities for poor children and teens.
Wallace said that first phase determined six building blocks for strong after-school systems: mayoral leadership and commitment to after school; multiyear planning; a coordinating entity to lead the work; access to reliable data; efforts to improve the quality of programs; and efforts to increase participation of youngsters in them.
Wallace said Jacksonville and the eight other cities already have made substantial progress in setting up a citywide system with the key building blocks in place — committed mayoral leadership and a sound ongoing planning process.