PAACT Accepted into NAACFRC’s Community Pilot Project Program
We like to think of PAACT: Promise All Atlanta Children Thrive as a mover and shaker—a coalition of doers. We convene partners, for instance, to implement our Repair & Renovation grant projects. We rally stakeholders all over the city to contribute to early education. We annually assemble our team of Atlanta Early Education Ambassadors (EEA) to inform families about the importance of early childhood and help them sign up for Georgia’s Pre-K and high-quality child care.
But an essential element of our work is also our research. PAACT conducts studies that inform our practices and strengthen our collective. This is supported by Early Learning Data Strategist, Danielle Wallace, our expert on research, evaluation, and data analysis.
Now Danielle and the rest of our PAACT team are embarking upon a new research project, thanks to some exciting partnership news: After a competitive selection process, PAACT has been accepted into the Community Pilot Project Program of the National African American Child and Family Research Center (NAACFRC).
The NAACFRC is affiliated with the Morehouse School of Medicine and believes that research on the African American community should come from within the African American Community.
Or, as Dr. Robert M. Mayberry, a Morehouse School of Medicine professor and the Center’s co-lead for capacity building, explains, “The best way to access the community voice and the research scholarship that we’re trying to generate at the Center is by working with community organizations.”
The Pilot Project Program sought applications from community-based organizations to conduct research on economic self-sufficiency/poverty alleviation or, our sweet spot, early care and education. (But of course, we know that both these categories are inextricably intertwined.)
PAACT won entry into the program, Mayberry says straightforwardly, because “PAACT articulated very well a problem worth pursuing, a possible solution to that problem, and indicated that they have the leadership and capacity to address the problem.”
PAACT’s $20,000 NAACFRC project will center on our Atlanta Early Education Ambassador program, which has been operating with great success for six years but has not yet been a research focus. Since the EEA program’s launch, the ambassadors have supported an estimated 2,050 Atlanta families/per year.
“To measure impact, we plan to study both the ambassadors themselves and the communities in which they work,” explains PAACT Director Shawnell Johnson. “We’ll see what’s working and what’s not working. Right now, for instance, our training is focused on early education, but one of the questions we have as we dive into this research is, should we be doing more about food insecurity and/or housing challenges?”
With tools ranging from focus groups to surveys to community meetings, PAACT will collect data and stories from our current and past ambassadors, who number around 30 per annual cohort.
“One of the most important reasons to study the EEA program,” Danielle says, “is that our ambassadors don’t always work together. They’re scattered across the city in diverse areas of need. They’re at events, in third spaces, in their neighbors’ neighborhoods, churches, and community centers. Their experiences and impacts are different, and we want to hear about all of it.
“Of course,” she adds with a game smile, “the fact that our ambassadors are kind of everything, everywhere, all at once, makes them a bit of a challenging subject. But that’s part of the joy of this for me! We want to meet our ambassadors—and capture their voices—wherever they’re at. What’s keeping them engaged? What do they wish they had at their disposal as they do this work?”
PAACT’s NAACFRC funding commences in September 2024 and we plan to hit the ground running by developing the research protocols and design.
Shawnell notes another task that she plans to jump on straightaway—developing a fruitful new relationship with the Center.
“As members of a pilot class,” she says, “we have a chance to give back to the program, sharing our insights as they, hopefully, make it a permanent endeavor. As excited as I am for this funding to help strengthen the EEA program, I also take seriously our commitment to being a resource and partner to NAACFRC.”