Our Mission:
To ensure ALL children and youth in Petaluma have the supports, resources and opportunities to be Ready by 21: Ready for lifelong learning, ready to work, ready to live.

Introduction

Communities and states across the country face the challenge of implementing a comprehensive and proactive systems approach when it comes to providing children and youth with the services, supports and opportunities they need to grow and thrive. Central to this challenge is engaging youth, families and youth-serving organizations across community sectors and collecting and presenting data in ways that build joint accountability for child and youth outcomes.

The Petaluma Youth Network (PYN) is the current manifestation of more than a decade of efforts in Petaluma to address the needs of youth in a powerful, systemic and collaborative way.

The PYN was introduced to the Forum for Youth Investment (FYI) in 2003 when the Forum provided technical assistance to the Petaluma High School Success Initiative. Building on their experiences in creating America’s Promise, The President’s Crime Prevention Council and the Center for Youth Development and Policy Research, the FYI advocates for a “big picture” approach to planning, research, advocacy and policy development to help communities invest in children, youth and families.

In 2009, the Petaluma Youth Network connected with the Forum for Youth Investment again. The Forum’s Ready by 21 framework was achieving success at the federal, state and regional level as a framework to assist policy makers and advocates in their efforts to develop more coordinated and aligned youth policies translating into improved practices and outcomes. The Petaluma Youth Network and the Network’s lead agency, the Healthy Community Consortium, received financial support from the California Unity Center, St. Joseph Health System – Sonoma County, and the Community Health Foundation of Greater Petaluma to create the Petaluma Ready by 21 framework and develop a community wide action plan for system change across and between child and youth serving organizations in Petaluma to achieve our mission of ensuring that all children and youth are Ready by 21.

How are young People doing in Petaluma?

Are they Ready to Learn, Work, and Live by 21? And how is our community doing in providing every young person the assets they need to succeed?

This working paper summarizes the theoretical basis for the Petaluma Ready by 21 Initiative and the structure we are using for our coordinated community-wide change process. This paper also introduces strategic priorities, goals and outcome objectives that we propose using to guide the community of Petaluma in changing the way we do business to change the odds for youth so that more children and young people from all sectors of the community and in all age groups have what they need to be Ready by 21—Ready for lifelong learning, Ready to work and Ready to live.

Developmental Areas

The Petaluma Ready by 21 Framework starts with five developmental areas that reflect the internal and external assets put forth by the Search Institute and adopted by United Way, State Department of Education, the Forum for Youth Investment and other major youth development experts. The five broad development areas are:

• Learning – having access to and developing positive basic and applied academic attitudes, skills and behaviors.
• Thriving – having access to and developing mentally, physically, emotionally and spiritually; having healthy attitudes, appropriate skills and demonstrating healthy behaviors.
• Connecting –having access to and developing positive social and emotional attitudes, skills and behaviors as well as having access to safe places and supportive multi-generational relationships.
• Working – having access to and cultivating positive career development attitudes, skills and behaviors.
• Leading –having access to and developing positive civic and leadership attitudes, skills, behaviors and relationships.

Ages

What young people need and are capable of varies greatly as they grow up and pass through various developmental stages. The importance of young people meeting key milestones that reflect their readiness for transitioning to less structure and more complexity has been reported in youth development research and has been recognized by participants in the Petaluma Youth Network planning process. The PYN has decided to use the following age ranges to reflect key age groups and to help us pinpoint important milestones to target for the purposes of ensuring that transitions in young people’s lives are attended to and addressed at the times when it is most critical:

• 0 to 5 years (Early childhood Pre Kindergarten)
• 6 to 11 years (Elementary School)
• 12 to 13 years (Middle school)
• 14 to 18 years (High school) and
• 19 to 21+ years (Young adulthood)

Types of Goals

For each developmental area and age period, there are a range of goals which young people, their parents, community members and policy makers can and do pursue, ranging from negative outcomes everyone wants to prevent to positive outcomes they wish to promote. The Petaluma Youth Network proposes that we look at grouping goals into three broad categories or “gears” to truly change the way we do business to have a sustainable and long term systematic improvement in child and youth outcomes. The three gears we know we need to move to support long term community change are child and youth outcomes, family and community supports; and leadership and policy.

1.  Improving individual and population-level child and youth outcomes.
These goals will

• Reduce risk
• Prevent problems and protect from harm
• Promote increased access, availability and participation
• Develop youth leadership

2.  Promoting settings that support child and youth development, within families and communities.
These goals will build capacity and help develop

• Caring adults
• Safe and structured places throughout the community
• Effective support and education for children, youth, and adults
• Opportunities for children, youth and adults to make a difference

3. Impacting institutional and public policy and leadership.
These goals will

• Ensure policies are congruent with asset-based child and youth development
• Align and realign resources with policies
• Engage families and youth in policy change
• Improve systems, services and programs
• Build capacity for ongoing collaborative monitoring and evaluation of progress

The Planning Process

Petaluma has an abundance of child and youth programs. We have a wide array of individual and common measures. We have a decade-long history of asset-based collaborative protocols. However, despite all the excellent efforts, we can still agree that ALL youth in Petaluma are NOT Ready by 21. Over the last two years, the Petaluma Youth Network has determined that in light of the current social and economical environment, and the shared commitment to youth success; Petaluma does need comprehensive, shared, community-wide goals and strategies to ensure that all youth are Ready by 21. We have also agreed that we need one overall coordinating body to help facilitate this collaborative process. The Petaluma Youth Network and the Ready by 21 Initiative is this collaborative community response to the challenge of ensuring ALL youth are Ready by 21.

The PYN has been engaged in an extensive planning process over the past 2 years with the intent to be inclusive, comprehensive and systematic. Simultaneously, the PYN has been in action to address “hot issues” impacting children and youth and to build community capacity in the face of dramatic reductions in financial support. The planning process has included electronic surveys to evaluate community ability to improve children and youth outcomes and to gather specific information about needs; youth focus groups; town hall meetings; expert informant meetings, strategy groups and community retreats. This paper reflects the “distilling down” of information gathered from this process.

The Importance of Successful Transitions

One thing that surfaced very clearly from our community planning process was the need to keep our eye on successful transitions. We know that children and youth develop 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in all types of community settings. We also know that there are benchmarks that parents and all manner of community organizations use to determine that young people are ready for transitioning to higher levels of independence and responsibility. In our community like many others we link those transitions to being ready for school, ready to move from elementary to middle school, middle to high school and from high school to community life. These transitions reflect not just school grade transitions but stages of development,.

The Ready by 21 Initiative will focus on ensuring that young people are ready for transitions because successful transitions support and predict lifelong readiness.The Petaluma Youth Network Ready by 21Initiative will help community members across all sectors agree on key outcomes and benchmarks that reflect readiness for transitions. The plan will help us work together to achieve shared outcomes to ensure that ALL children and youth from all over the community succeed.

System Change Themes

Six themes emerged through this planning process that cross all developmental areas, age groups and goal types. These themes provide a way for people to galvanize their passion for community change and break up old habits and systems that do not serve us today. By looking through the lens of strategic themes that cross programmatic, sector and age groups we will see new ways to work to increase the potential for youth success.

The six themes that have emerged are:

1. Caring relationships
   Developing and strengthening peer to peer and cross generational relationships have been identified as a cornerstone of youth success. This system change theme is closely linked with two additional core resiliency factors: meaningful participation and high expectations.

2. Youth leadership
   We know that young people who have a say in and share responsibility for their schools, cities and local organizations are invested in the future of their communities. Meaningful and developmentally needed leadership opportunities create and enhance young people’s connections and contributions to the larger community. Youth leadership occurs when young people have the opportunity to not only serve their community, but to transform their community.

3. Parent participation
   From early childhood through young adulthood, research shows us that parent participation is crucial to child and youth success. As our community systems have changed over the past 15 years with more single parent families, two working adults and increased demands on institutions to ensure safety and accountability, parents and other community volunteers have moved from forefront to back seat or out of the picture in child and youth support. Parents and youth alike are calling for a shift back to the basics of parent and adult volunteer participation.

4. Aligning resources and policies across all age groups, all developmental areas and all sectors of the community.
   Over the years as a wide array of children and youth policies and programs have been established from the local to the federal level. So have a myriad of funding streams, regulations and practices developed. We must make certain that public efforts to address children and youth issues are all “pulling in the same direction”. We want to align new and existing policies and programs to achieve shared results and ensure that public resources are used as efficiently and effectively as possible.

5. Common measures and evaluation
   Consistently tracking the contributions of our community initiatives and programs toward common indicators will enable policy makers and practitioners to make optimally informed decisions and direct resources to the most effective strategies in these increasingly challenging economic times.

6. Communication
   Whether it is posting the 40 developmental assets and how to be an asset builder, a web site that links the Petaluma Ready by 21 goals, strategies and activities to community resources, or any other activity; communication is at the heart of the Petaluma Youth Network and our Ready by 21 Initiative and at improving the odds for every child and youth to be ready for life long learning, ready for work and ready for life.

What follows is the beginning of our community action-plan that details goals and outcome objectives to begin the shift to a collaborative and proactive approach to ensuring all children and youth have what they need to be Ready by 21 for life-long learning, working and living successful lives. These proposed goals and outcome objectives are a consolidation of the ideas and hard work of all youth and adult participants in the various PYN activities during the planning process. In order to ensure a plan that can be monitored and its impact evaluated, the goals and outcome objectives included all have an identified source of local data that is available through local and/or county-level partners. They also align with a strategic county-wide initiative, Health Action, which envisions that Sonoma County will be the healthiest county in CA to live, work and play, a place where people thrive and achieve their life potential. Health Action, convened by the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors in 2007, has developed 10 strategic goals, addressing key social, economic and environmental determinants of health and wellbeing, and which are reflected in the attached proposed planning framework.

Petaluma Youth Network: “Ready by 21”
Planning Framework 2010 – 2014

The following are measureable outcome objectives for Children & Youth Outcomes that the Petaluma Youth Network will focus on achieving in the next 5 years, understanding that the members of the Network and other stakeholders are currently engaged in addressing these topics through a variety of activities. These objectives are currently being tracked by various partners, and will guide the development of the Network’s action plan. We have not identified the specific amount of change in each outcome objective. This will be determined by the Ready by 21 Action teams in the first quarter of 2010.

As we move into action, the six System Change Themes of Enhancing Meaningful and Caring Relationships between Adults, Children and Youth; Youth Leadership Development, Parent and Adult Participation/Engagement, Communication, Aligning Resources; and Common Measures will also be used across and throughout the community as a way to focus and guide the Network’s action plan. We will also keep a particular eye on the transitional moments in the lives of children and youth as critical opportunities for intervention.

Children & Youth Outcomes and Objectives

LEARNING Children and youth in Petaluma will be prepared and supported for lifelong learning and education.

• 0-5   Pre School
  Increase by XX% children entering kindergarten with a quality preschool experience.
• 6-11   Elementary School
  Increase by XX% 4th graders proficient or advanced in English language arts.
• 12-13   Jr. H.S.
  Increase by XX% 8th graders proficient or advanced in Algebra one.
• 14-18   H.S.
  Increase by XX% youth who graduate H.S. in 4 years with a plan and, prepared to advance academically.
• 19-24   Post-H.S.
  Increase by XX% youth who engage in further education/training after H.S.

WORKING Children and youth in Petaluma will be prepared and supported for employment of their choice.

• 0-5   Pre School
  To be determined by the strategy team
• 6-11   Elementary School
  To be determined by the strategy team
• 12-13   Jr. H.S.
  Increase by XX% 8th graders using the Kuder Career Planning System within their career exploration activities.
• 14-18   H.S.
  Increase by XX% youth completing internship, apprenticeship or career oriented senior project.
• 19-24   Post-H.S.
  Increase by XX% youth employed full or part-time

THRIVING Children and youth will have improved physical and mental health status.

• 0-5   Pre School
  Decrease by XX% rate of iron deficiency anemia.
• 6-11   Elementary School
  Increase by XX% physical fitness of 5th graders.
• 12-13   Jr. H.S.
  Increase by XX% utilization of mental health services by youth.
• 14-18   H.S.
  Increase by XX% utilization of health services by youth.
• 19-24   Post-H.S.
  Decrease by XX% self-reported binge drinking among youth.

CONNECTING Children and youth in Petaluma will be an obvious part of the community’s social fabric.

• 0-5   Pre School
  Increase by XX% children in early childhood education.
• 6-11   Elementary School
  Increase by XX% children receiving mentoring.
• 12-13   Jr. H.S.
  Increase by XX% youth reporting meaningful participation in school.
• 14-18   H.S.
  Increase by XX% youth participating in community service/service learning projects.
• 19-24   Post-H.S.
  Increase by XX% voter registration among youth.

LEADING Children and youth in Petaluma will have leadership roles among peers and in the community.

• 0-5   Pre School
• 6-11   Elementary School
  Increase by XX# children being mentored by older youth.
• 12-13   Jr. H.S.
  Increase by XX# youth being mentored by older youth.
• 14-18   H.S.
  Increase by XX# of youth actively participating in boards, committees and commissions.
• 19-24   Post-H.S.
  Increase by XX# of youth actively participating in boards, committees and commissions.

Family and Community/Leadership and Policy Outcomes and Objectives

The Petaluma Youth Network has begun to identify System Change Outcomes and Objectives to support Family & Community Change as well as Leadership and Policy Change. System Change outcomes and objectives are achieved in settings throughout the community. These system change outcomes and objectives will support caring adults, safe and structured places, effective supports and opportunities to make a difference. This way, all three “gears” in the Ready by 21 Framework are engaged to improve child and youth outcomes.

A number of system change outcomes and objectives clearly cut across all sectors of the community, throughout different age groups and developmental areas and will be further developed during the final phase of action planning by Network members.

Family and Community/Leadership and Policy Outcomes and Objectives

• Increase family participation in parenting support resources and programs in school and community settings.
• Increase offerings and adult participation in mentoring and tutoring programs.
• Increase offerings and youth participation in career exploration, job shadowing, apprenticeship, service learning, and internship opportunities.
• Increase adult and youth volunteerism throughout school and other community settings
• Increase parent participation in advisory committees or boards of youth serving organizations.
• Increase self-sufficiency and reduce poverty among families of children and youth.
• Increase youth and adult governance bodies in public and agency settings that are representative of Petaluma’s current demographics.
• Increase opportunities for youth and parent leadership in public and organizational advisory and decision-making bodies.
• Enhance development, implementation, monitoring and reporting of all school Wellness plans.
• Reduce disparities in child and youth outcomes.

Other system change outcomes and objectives more clearly link to developmental areas.

Family & Community/Leadership and Policy Outcomes and Objectives

Developmental Area     Learning

• Family & Community Change Objectives
  Increase school and parent participation in SCOE’s “Jump Start Program”
• Potential Supporting Policy or Leadership Objectives
  Include “Jump Start” in Wellness Policies

Developmental Area     Working

• Family & Community Change Objectives
  Increase # businesses offering quality internship, apprenticeship and job shadowing opportunities
• Potential Supporting Policy or Leadership Objectives
  Integrate internships, apprenticeships, and job shadowing into school curriculum and structures

Developmental Area     Thriving

• Family & Community Change Objectives
  Decrease repeat violations of Social Host Ordinance

• Potential Supporting Policy or Leadership Objectives
  Adopt and implement city-wide Special Events Policy

Developmental Area     Connecting

• Family & Community Change Objectives
  Increase utilization of justice system diversion programs
• Potential Supporting Policy or Leadership Objectives
  Develop sustainable funding stream for School Resource Officers

Developmental Area     Leading

• Family & Community Change Objectives
  Ensure dedicated staff to Petaluma Youth Commission
• Potential Supporting Policy or Leadership Objectives
  Adopt city ordinance supporting youth seats on key commissions and advisory councils.

NEXT STEPS

Action Plan Development & Implementation

The Petaluma Youth Network is forming Action Teams to begin implementation of its action plan. These teams will begin to work across the five developmental areas (thriving, connecting, learning, working, leading) and the six system change strategies identified through the planning process as critical to success in Petaluma: (Youth Leadership, Caring Relationships, Parent Participation, Communication, Aligning Resources and Common Measurement and Evaluation).

Each of the action planning teams will include content experts, youth and representatives from various sectors of the community. Team will meet in February to begin their work.

Team leaders from each Action Planning Team will be invited to serve as members of the Petaluma Youth Network Steering Committee. The PYN will also work with top executives and board leadership across the community to support the work of this initiative over the next 3-5 years at the policy, leadership and staff level.

Acknowledgement:

We wish to acknowledge the Forum for Youth Investment for technical assistance and Iowa Collaboration for Youth Development, Massachusetts State Wide Action Plan, Ready by 21 Austin and Georgetown Divide for examples of tools and documents.