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CEC partners on federal grant
to help Buffalo schoolchildren
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“We’re the process people, the conduit. As the partners need things from us—faculty, staff, data—we get them.”
Helping children living in the neighborhoods around the UB South Campus achieve academic success is the goal of a community partnership that has received a prestigious $500,000 federal grant to help it in its efforts.
Buffalo was only one of 21 communities around the country to receive a competitive neighborhood development planning grant last October from the U.S. Department of Education’s $10 million “Promise Neighborhoods” program. The local partnership, called Buffalo Promise, will receive a total of $750,000 from the federal government and local funders, including M&T Bank and the John R. Oishei Foundation.
Mara Huber, director of UB’s Center for Educational Collaboration (CEC) and UB’s liaison for the partnership, gave details on the grant and the CEC’s other activities at a recent public meeting on the South Campus hosted by UB’s Office of Government Relations. Invited were Western New York legislative delegation and community members, including several interested parents, who came to hear details on the Promise Neigborhoods grant—a perfect example, Huber says, of how UB faculty and staff can be tapped as community resources.
The CEC was created in 2007 as an independent center to connect UB’s research, evaluation and programs to the Buffalo Public Schools and other area schools in order to create more opportunities for children to prepare for college and successful careers.
“Our partnership with Buffalo Public Schools continues to evolve and deepen in important and exciting ways,” Huber said at the meeting. “We are really strengthening our work around research and helping the district to understand the impact of their various initiatives.”
Through the CEC, UB is now a partner in Buffalo Promise, whose grant application team was led by the M&T Foundation through the Westminster Charter Community School Foundation. Other major community partners include the Oishei Foundation, Buffalo Public Schools, the United Way, Read to Succeed Buffalo, Catholic Charities, the Buffalo Urban League and the city of Buffalo.
All proposals for the Promise Neighborhood grant program had to demonstrate how a community would use the federal funding to address the academic, social and emotional challenges facing students and their families living in an area of concentrated poverty. For the Buffalo grant, that encompasses neighborhoods in the 14214 and 14215 zip codes, and includes three low-achieving schools: Bennett High School, Highgate Heights Elementary School and Westminster Charter School.
Promise Neighborhood grantees and their partner organizations also must provide services from early learning to college and career, including programs to improve the health, safety and stability of neighborhoods, and boost family engagement in student learning.
Huber says Buffalo Promise will go one step further to identify gaps in resources and then provide “cradle-to-career” support to area children—all the way from pregnancy and early childhood through their pre-K to high school years, eventually launching them into higher education and successful jobs.
“The Buffalo community is so rich in resources, but where we struggle is in connecting and mobilizing those resources in a way that results in change,” she says, adding that Buffalo Promise “provides us with a really exciting opportunity to work this out.”
Right now, says Huber, the Urban League and other partners, including the UB Regional Institute, are focusing on conducting needs analyses in the targeted neighborhoods. Through a new database now in development, that work will help link various support organizations to the targeted children and their families. The CEC’s role includes mobilizing UB by engaging its faculty and consulting the grantees on program evaluation and needs assessment.
“We’re the process people, the conduit,” Huber explains. “As the partners need things from us—faculty, staff, data—we get them.”
Most recently, the CEC convened meetings between a variety of UB units, including the Educational Opportunity Center, the Center for Academic Development Services and pre-collegiate programs, to discuss the high school-to-college transition, a phase that builds on the CEC’s four-year connection to the public school district.
Promise Neighborhoods was modeled on Harlem Children’s Zone, a community-based educational development program in New York City whose success prompted President Obama to replicate it throughout the country. Huber visited Harlem to observe the program and found it to be “one of the most impressive I’ve seen because the focus is always on the children’s success and their realities.”
According to the planning grant proposal, the goal is to eventually expand Promise Neighborhoods programming to reach 14,000 additional residents in neighborhoods near 14215 and create a similar private-public partnership to improve education on Buffalo’s West Side.
The Buffalo Promise coalition hopes to apply for a follow-up grant from the federal Department of Education this spring that Huber says would help implement the full “web of supports” identified by the planning grant for the proposed neighborhoods, including summer camps, after-school programs, volunteerism, service learning, mentoring, tutoring and college preparation and other programs.
In addition to Buffalo Promise, the CEC is involved in a number of activities:
- Destination College!: Launching locally in March, this national college-access program provides high school juniors with guidance through the financial aid and application process. The CEC is managing the program, along with GEMS (Grace, Education, Mentoring, Service), a Buffalo association of churches and community organizations.
- Buffalo Tanzanian Education Project: In what began as a project to support African teenage girls, UB’s ongoing partnership with the Immaculate Heart Sisters of Africa in Tanzania has expanded: The university and Solar Liberty Foundation recently provided solar cookers to women in the small rural village of Kitenga, near Lake Victoria, as part of an effort to involve a multidisciplinary group of community members and university students, faculty and staff in the overseas project.
- Excelsior Scholars: This two-week summer STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) program is geared toward promising seventh-graders and offers hands-on research projects with real-world impact.
- UB Buffalo Partnership Scholars Program: Annual scholarships to UB that reward promising students with full resident tuition and fees for up to four consecutive years of undergraduate study, a yearly book stipend and a laptop computer.
- Extended Learning Opportunities Program (ELOP): A four-week, half-day summer program for Buffalo Public Schools students in grades 5-8 identified as “persistently lowest achieving” by the New York State Education Department.
- Wiggle Your Power: Now in its second year, this one-week program gives students ages 8-12 fun opportunities to become involved in their community as part of the CEC’s growing emphasis on civics and community engagement.
For more information about CEC programs, visit its website.
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