Alex Kolker, Community Impact Manager for Education for the United Way of the Quad Cities Area, submitted this guest blog. If you’d like to submit a guest blog about your community, contact Phyllis Jordan at pjordan@thehatchergroup.com.

We are very excited to be a finalist in this year’s All-American City Grade-Level Reading competition.

As a single metro area made up of five separate cities (in two different states), we have a lot of different programs, agencies, and school initiatives which address school readiness, summer learning, school attendance, and grade-level reading, but these programs are all separate.  There is no single over-arching plan or goal.

The All-American City Award competition gave us a chance to bring all of these stakeholders to the table.  There were 25 agencies and community leaders in all, including school superintendents and assistant superintendents, librarians, early learning specialists, truancy officers, social service providers, and government officials.

For three months, this group met, hammering out a plan to address grade-level reading.  In the Quad Cities, minority and low-income students are much less likely to be reading at grade level by the third grade.  Our goal is to eliminate this achievement gap by the year 2020.

Our approach is not to replace any existing program, or to create new programs that would just compete with what is already working in the community.  Instead, we have created an overall framework, based on the Collective Impact model, which would help the existing programs work together: sharing resources, combining services, and serving a larger percentage of the population more effectively.

Because we are not creating new programs, our plan can achieve our results without extensive costs.  We will not need substantial new resources.  On the contrary: our plan is to help use local resources more efficiently so that we can serve more children for less cost.

Our local United Way is currently researching ways to implement the plan in our community, whether we are selected as an All-American City or not.

We’d like to thank all of the Quad Cities organizations and individuals who helped up put our plan together.  And we are looking forward to the conference, to see what other communities have come up with.

Most of all, we are grateful to the All-American City group for helping us galvanize the Quad Cities around this vital issue.

If you want to learn more about the work around education happening in our community, visit our web site at unitedwayqc.org.