Investing in Staff: Priceless
Stephen M. Pratt, President
Dear Friends:
A few years ago, a great deal of money was spent to find out if quality relationships with adults make a difference for child outcomes. Thankfully, the authors concluded that these relationships do have a significant impact. Pfew! Glad we nailed that one down.
There are concepts that are so self-evident that one wonders how systems could ever be set up that don't take them into account. Here in the out-of-school time world, that obvious concept is that if you invest in the quality of people who work with kids, you'll get quality results. With the release of the Massachusetts After School Research Study (MARS) in December, our understanding went far beyond the obvious, with compelling evidence of how specific forms of staff preparation and training lead to specific results for kids. So one might conclude that in a field increasingly focused on investing in quality, ample provision would already have been made to invest in people.
Sadly there is meager evidence to support the view that we are investing in people in our field. Our study of the out-of-school workforce finds the front lines staffed by part-time, underpaid and undertrained workers. Taken as a whole, the nonprofit sector is characterized by undercapitalized organizations that pinch and scrimp to ensure that they can deliver services to clients. We pinch the most when it comes to people. And yet, as this research shows, when we scrimp on people, we scrimp on results.
Paul Light writes in the current issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, "charities ... should be honest about what it really costs to run a successful organization."
In the youth development field, people are what it costs. And until we start making the costs of training and compensating a high-quality workforce a non-negotiable element of every grant that's written, we will continue to struggle for high-quality results.
Thanks for reading,
Guest Column
"Barriers toward staff development are the same barriers all programs face: salary, compensation and benefits, time for planning curriculum, training and high turnover rates."
By Sylvia Clark, Director of the Child Care Resource Office of YMCA of Greater Boston
"Volunteer coaches are the mainstay of most youth sport organizations. Yet because youth sports organizations rely heavily on volunteers, the development of coaching skills and knowledge necessary to create a safe and positive experience for players are often lacking."
By Chris Lynch, Boston Youth Sports Coordinator
New Additions on this Topic to our Online Research Library
Evidence for Action: Strengthening After-School Programs for All Children and Youth, Massachusetts’ After School and Out-of-School Time Workforce Study
Commissioned by Boston After School & Beyond and written by Wellesley Centers for Women and the Program in Education Afterschool & Resiliency, Harvard University
This study aggregates existing data to provide a current and comprehensive outline of Massachusetts’ after school workforce. Its findings illuminate the issues that the state’s emerging OST workforce development system must address in order to improve the outcome of after school programs for school aged children and youth.
Preparing the Early Education and Care Workforce: The Capacity of Massachusetts' Institutions of Higher Education
Originally commissioned by Strategies for Children and then expanded by Boston After School & Beyond the study was conducted by the Center for Research on Women at Wellesley College.
The study describes the current early education and care workforce and the capacity of Massachusetts Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) to meet the labor demands of the sector.
Making it Work: Creating a Professional Development System in Massachusetts for the Early Education and Care and Out-of-School Time Workforce
Released by United Way of Massachusetts Bay and the Schott Foundation for Public Education
This report has recommendations to ensure that children receive quality education and care both before they enter school and after the school bell rings.
Frontline Youth Worker Observation Assessment Tool
The National Collaboration for Youth has released a new assessment tool to accompany the 10 competencies for front-line youth workers. The tool can be used in multiple ways, for example, as a training outline to assist trainers in describing an organization's expectations for youth worker behavior and attitudes.
Attracting, Developing and Retaining Youth Workers for the Next Generation
This report is meant to inform and engage individuals in the next steps of building a national professional development system for youth workers. It summarizes a Wingspread Conference on Attracting, Developing and Retaining Youth Workers for the Next Generation, held in November 2004. It describes the research conducted to document the need, highlights the background materials used to inform Wingspread participants, and summarizes the results and outcomes of the conference.