For over a decade, through our Great Expectations (GE) special initiative, we’ve worked to ensure children in Forsyth County, NC were ready for success in kindergarten and beyond.
Today, we’re excited to deliver our evaluation report.
As GE has recently sunset, we are sharing this report to help us envision the work ahead.
10 Years of Great Expectations
A Fire Sparked
Our report offers key findings about what the Trust and GE grantees learned and accomplished through a decade of working together. It traces how the initiative transformed and worked to realize its goals as a connected community and paints a vision for the work to come.
“The GE report summarizes the impact of this initiative from the voices of those who led the workâpeople are seeing the full humanity of our neighbors, especially our children, and modeling how we can make progress together.”
Dr. Laura Gerald
President
Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust
The report analyzes how GE catalyzed a decade of activity.
Our evaluators, Frontline Solutions, collected information from key participants sharing their thoughts and data around:
- Community-led maternal health programs shifting power to Black mothers and influencing institutional practice.
- Early childhood efforts driving policy change, leveraging public funding (a 4.5 million ARPA grant), and reducing exclusionary discipline.
- A program to help Family, Friend, and Neighbor caregivers gain visibility, voice, and organizing power.
We’ve grown a lot, working together.
We learned how amplifying community power, building the capacity of organizations doing the work, and centering equity puts on us a path to changing narratives and influencing inequitable policies and practices.
“These efforts built lasting community leadership and infrastructure that the Trust can carry forward through all our work.”
Shenell McClurkin Thompson
Senior Program Officer
Local Impact in Forsyth County
We remain committed to children and families.
As GE comes to a close, we are not shutting the door, we are opening new ones.
We want to be very clear: we will continue this work in new ways. We know that in order for children to be well, we have to create a thriving community where everyone can be well.
Thank you for helping children and families succeed.
Read the report.