Officially launched in the Fall of 2022, the Cabinet is a partnership between community members and the city of Carbondale. Together, we recognize that the children and youth of today are the business and community leaders of tomorrow. We must do all we can to help ensure their well-being and success. Investing in them is an investment in our future.
The role of the Community Children’s Cabinet is to facilitate collaboration and improve the coordination of programs and services in the community. Our overall goal is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of both the city’s and community stakeholders’ efforts to improve child and youth outcomes. Examples of Cabinet activities include:
Mapping out an ideal cradle-to-career pipeline designed to promote the success of children and youth in the community
Identifying available and potential assets to fill those gaps.
Conducting a gap analysis: What’s missing? Where do services, supports, and opportunities fall short?
Implementing strategies that improve families' access to programs and services and ,breaking down barriers encountered when trying to access those services.
Every child needs to be seen and heard. With many families struggling to meet their child’s most basic needs ( food, housing, healthcare, etc.), too many of our community’s children are falling through the cracks. As a result, more and more teachers are seeing the effects that experiencing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACES) has on their student’s growth and learning. We cannot expect our schools to do this alone. As a community we need to do more to support the health, well being and growth of children and youth in our community.
Since 2016, the Southern Illinois Coalition for Children and Families, has provided leadership and support to build strong communities, strengthen families, and promotes children’s success in school and life.
Resilient Southern Illinois (SI) was founded in 2016 and brought forth as an educational initiative by the Southern Illinois PreK-20 Education Alliance under the leadership of Mary Jane Morris. with support from the Illinois Education Association and the Partnership for Resilience.
This multi-year effort helps member school districts in southern Illinois meet the needs of children impacted by childhood trauma and toxic stress
The initiative includes resources, tools, and networking opportunities for educators and other personnel in these districts designed to support them in addressing the needs of the “whole child.” It also included building a partnership with Harvard’s Graduate School of Education’s EdRedesign Lab.
Harvard’s Education Redesign Lab is leading national efforts to build support for the changes needed in how we educate today’s youth. One approach has been to pilot the creation of individualized student success plans for students. Unity Point School was the first “rural school” in the country to implement this approach in 2018.
Harvard provided the original template for Unity Point’s individualized student success plans. School officials then tweaked it to fit their own students’ needs.
Four years later, Carbondale District #95 committed to working toward utilizing student success planning in their schools as well. Both schools were two of only 28 school districts in the country selected to participate in the Ed Redesign Lab’s Success Planning cohort of communities working on designing and implementing personalized, cradle-to-career support for all children.
True pioneers… in our own community!
The Children’s Cabinet partners with the school to help ensure the resources and services needed for these students to succeed are available.