More than 40 Partner organizations of Eastside Pathways have been working together for over two years in an effort to support Bellevue children and youth from cradle to career. Significant work has been done in the areas of early learning, school attendance and summer and extended learning, as well as data sharing.
In an effort to expand this work further into the Bellevue community, Eastside Pathways started a community engagement effort aimed at directly engaging different stakeholder groups – parents, youth, and businesses.
Parents and caregivers are crucial to children’s success and Eastside Pathways is interested in hearing the voices of all parents, especially given that different communities in Bellevue have different needs, perspectives and experiences. Equally important is getting parents involved in Eastside Pathways work. In an effort to begin to mobilize parents, Jess Garcia from Bellevue PTSA Council and Catherine Cruz from Boys and Girls Club of Bellevue have stepped up to lead a Parent Leadership Group to include and solicit the voices of Hispanic parents and caregivers.
Jess and Catherine are pulling together different community leaders who are working to organize and decide on priorities and actions. Though the group has only met a few times, it is already exploring and working to understand the best way to include other organizations who are well positioned to provide services to children, family, and youth in the community. This is only the beginning, and the team knows it will learn a great deal through challenges and successes. We fully expect that this can be a model for how Eastside Pathways includes the voices of many more of the diverse communities which make Bellevue such a rich, vibrant place to live and educate our children.
Youth involvement is very important in planning and executing programs aimed towards the success of children of all ages. They can bring a unique perspective on the planned initiatives and they may be crucial in the implementation stages. Last spring, Eastside Pathways organized a series of roundtable meetings with students from different schools and backgrounds to understand what is important to youth and how they would like to get involved. Building on these meetings, we recruited a Youth Leadership team, a junior from Forest Ridge and a senior from Newport High, who will be planning youth involvement in the work of Eastside Pathways. Some ideas voiced so far are: mentoring elementary and middle school students, helping with the attendance work, and being mentored by representatives of the local business community.
Businesses are the third community group that have a role and can contribute to the success of children and youth. There are numerous ways businesses can engage apart from career mentoring, for example working together with BSD or different providers to support or improve the program offering. We are currently looking for business people to help lead this effort.
The Community Engagement work has just started and has still a long way to go, but our vision is to have everybody’s voice heard and every community group engaged in working towards a better future for our children.
Contributed by Monika Steen, Eastside Pathways