On November 21, 2019, the Raising of Fort Worth community celebrated five years of early education convenings with a diverse group of stakeholders. Following is a high-level summary of what we have learned, how we have grown together as a community, and why today our City stands stronger and with more momentum than ever before in building Fort Worth as the Best Place for Kids!

Year 1: 2015

GOAL: To create a community forum that would bring diverse leaders together to discuss the educational and economic impact of ensuring a strong start for every child in Fort Worth.
THE CASE FOR EARLY CHILDHOOD: At our first meeting in May 2015 with 200 community partners in the room, we presented the case for investing in quality early education, and began a community-wide conversation and collective visioning on what the future of Fort Worth could look like if we had a local cross-sector movement around this cause.
THE ROLE OF ROFW: With the Early Learning Alliance working on systems-level change, the Raising of Fort Worth began to serve as a complementary community engagement arm, plugging in a broader swath of nontraditional players into this work.

Year 2: 2016

SECTOR ADVOCATES: Sector advocates emerged in 2016 to take a more action-oriented role in the ROFW effort, with leaders from business, higher ed, government, nonprofit, philanthropy, and healthcare developing tangible actions to raise awareness and support quality early learning for every child.
ACTION PLANS: These action plans included ideas around surveying employees and allowing employees time off to volunteer in early learning environments….to health care executives coming together to develop a comprehensive plan for how they could educate new parents about quality child care while they were in their hospitals.
READ FORT WORTH ALIGNMENT: This coincided with the establishment of Read Fort Worth. Many of our sector leaders were given opportunities to plug-in more meaningfully as the Mayor formed a partnership with FWISD’s Superintendent Scribner and the Early Learning Alliance as the emphasis on early literacy and quality child care continued to be front and center for our community and City leadership.

Year 3: 2017

NATIONAL LEARNING TOUR: We conducted a “national learning tour,” bringing in experts from around the country who were excelling in key early education areas.
SUCCESSFUL CITY STRATEGIES: We hosted leaders from Denver, Tulsa, and New York, who spoke about their community-school partnerships, integrated health and education programs, and community-wide data tracking methods that helped inform their own communities’ work and positively impacted their youngest students and families.

Year 4: 2018

FORT WORTH EXPERTS: We continued to bring in nationally renowned researchers, but we coupled them with our own local experts in the early childhood field so we could truly have an exchange of information around best practices.
LASTING CONNECTIONS: These series of dialogues resulted in lasting connections that have benefited us in Fort Worth – but that has also enabled our great leaders on the ground here to be a valuable resource for other communities around the country seeking to innovate and develop cohesive early childhood systems and policies.
NATIONAL INTEREST: Pairing nationally renowned researchers with our local experts on the ground resulted in cities across the U.S. asking Fort Worth, “How have you successfully coalesced around a common vision and strategy for early education that has resulted in better opportunities for children and families?”

Year 5: 2019

BEST PLACE FOR KIDS!: In 2019 we collectively, under Mayor Betsy Price’s leadership, put a stake in the ground to Build Fort Worth as the Best Place for Kids!
WHITE HOUSE ROUNDTABLE: The White House asked Fort Worth leaders to participate in a roundtable to share its approach to quality early learning and child care. The resounding theme? Fort Worth is unique in its whole-community approach.
WHOLE-COMMUNITY APPROACH: Our efforts have included: 1) Strengthening our infrastructure to serve infants and toddlers, 2) Boosting kindergartners’ learning over the summer, 3) Connecting parents to critical community resources, and 4) Lifting up “family-friendly” business practices that help working parents AND help boost businesses’ bottom line.

Go-Forward Vision

Our Fort Worth community doesn’t just talk about solutions. We implement and measure those solutions so we can iterate, learn together, grow as a national model for early education, and most importantly – improve in our efforts to help our local children, families, and businesses thrive.

The Best Place for Kids! effort is a natural outgrowth of all of the collaborative work that has been done across our city over the past several years to support a strong start for every child – and is inclusive of all of the partners who have stepped up to be a part of this vision. It is the new brand of Raising of Fort Worth – a single, unified rally cry.

As we build a branding umbrella to help lift up all of our great local early education initiatives and promote Fort Worth’s early education vision both statewide and nationally, we are excited to continue to gather next year as the “Best Place for Kids!” event series.

So while the Raising of Fort Worth name will change, the purpose and nature of these convenings will not – it will continue to be our community’s trusted source for information, best practice sharing, and elevating the successful strategies underway in Fort Worth that are helping to make it the Best Place for Kids!

For more information, visit www.BestPlace4Kids.com.

Looking Back: Five Years of the Raising of Fort Worth