The following action steps are written in SMART Goal format. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Community members are encouraged to utilize this page to determine if their local community could benefit from implementing these action steps. Consider these as guidelines for further discussion in the direction of tax dollars to provide ideal environments for children and citizens. Take your community’s resources, economic and social strengths, and crime rates over the last 25-50 years into consideration.
Click the small triangle ▶ to see more details about an idea.
Spot the 📽️ icon? Click it for a short video that goes deeper into the goal.
Action Steps at the Town Hall Level:
Parenting Workshops 📽️
- Specific: Provide parenting workshops and resources to help families create supportive home environments.
- Measurable: Host 10 workshops and reach 200 parents within 1 year.
- Achievable: Collaborate with local family support organizations and use existing community spaces.
- Relevant: Parenthood is not easy. People often recreate the home environments they grew up in regardless of how healthy those environments were. Parenting workshops will create safe spaces to address frustrations and come up with family bonding ideas, hence increasing the occurrence of PCE #1, “having a supportive family environment”
- Time-Bound: Schedule the first workshop within 3 months and complete all 10 within 12 months.
Events to Foster Friendships
- Specific: Organize community events (playgroups, game nights, team building activities, school sleep-ins, etc.) to help children build friendships.
- Measurable: Host 12 events and involve 150 children within 1 year.
- Achievable: Use community centers, schools, and parks as venues and recruit volunteers to help organize and supervise.
- Relevant: Supervised community events provide context for children to create memories together and for adults to notice tension or unhealthy relations between children to address or flag for professional intervention.
- Time-Bound: Host the first event within 2 months and continue monthly events.
Community-Based Mentorships 📽️
- Specific: Establish a mentorship program connecting children with trusted adults (i.e. teenagers with professionals in areas of interest, pre-k aged children with retirees).
- Measurable: Vet 100% of town hall attendees within 3 months.The vetting process should include background checks and psychological tests. Work with school counselor(s) and leadership to pair eligible candidates with students at a 1:3 ratio. More experienced mentors can take on more than 3 mentees if their schedule permits. Train mentors on safety precautions such as:
- Avoid being alone with a child.
- If alone with a child, be in sight of a recording camera with audio.
- Phrases or behaviors that are indicators of abuse, endangerment, or suicidal thoughts and the number to child protective services.
- Achievable: Examine town hall and school budget to determine realistic financial incentive for completing the vetting process and mentoring.
- Relevant: A mentorship would pair children with non-family adults who are safe for the child to engage with.
- Time-Bound: Complete the mentor-child matches within 12 months of program launch.
Modeling School Pride
- Specific: Town hall leaders can model school pride and facilitate award ceremonies at children’s events and competitions.
- Measurable: A town hall member should be present and at least 20 school events open to the public within 1 year.
- Achievable: Review events at the beginning of each month through the first week of the following month and rotate the attending town hall members.
- Relevant: Having a town hall member present at school events open to the public will model pride in school and in children’s achievements, increasing the likelihood that children feel school is important and meaningful.
- Time-Bound: Work with local schools to create a calendar of events for the school year by mid-October, then establish the schedule of attending Town Hall members by end of October.
Providing Supervised Child-Centered Spaces
- Specific: Ensure there is at least one supervised park or community center per 15-mile radius of residential zones and a park per 15-minute walking distance per residential zone.
- Measurable: Ensure 200 children use supervised spaces/6 months. Maintenance should be performed monthly on unsupervised spaces.
- Achievable: Use existing facilities or partner with local organizations to staff and maintain supervised spaces and to incorporate maintenance of unsupervised parks into a monthly schedule.
- Relevant: Supervised spaces further ensure safety of participants and can also increase the range of activities accessible. For example, water parks, ranges, farms, petting zoos, etc. are possible for children to experience if they are supervised by professionals other than the children’s parents/caretakers.
- Time-Bound: Charter plans to build any needed spaces within 3 months and determine a schedule for construction and staffing within the first 6 months. All spaces should be built and open within 24 months.
Increasing Access to Enjoyable Activities 📽️
- Specific: Offer free or low-cost extracurricular activities for children in the community. Supplement the cost of classes/admission for participants under the age of 18 enrolled in community schools and/or offer incentives for local businesses that provide extracurricular activities to grant free or low-cost access to their facilities.
- Measurable: Enroll 300 children in extracurricular activities within 1 year.
- Achievable: Partner with local organizations, volunteers, and business owners to fund and run programs.
- Relevant: By experiencing a diversity of enjoyable activities, children increase their adaptability as well as their exposure to finding the thing(s) that resonate most with them.
- Time-Bound: Launch 5 programs within 6 months and expand to 10 programs within 12 months.
Altruistic Community Engagement Opportunities 📽️
- Specific: Create volunteer opportunities for children to contribute to the community.
- Measurable: Engage 100 children in volunteer activities within 6 months.
- Achievable: Partner with local nonprofits and schools, especially schools’ student government, to organize age-appropriate activities.
- Relevant: Helping others increases connected and belonging, which increase the flow of “happy hormones” such as serotonin and decreases likelihood of struggling with mental health issues such as depression and suicidal thoughts, particularly among teenagers.
- Time-Bound: Launch the first volunteer event within 2 months and expand to monthly events within 6 months.
Action Steps at the School Level:
The following 7 programs facilitate all 7 Positive Childhood Experiences for enrolled students:
Family Connectedness Program 📽️
- Specific: Launch a Family Connectedness Program with monthly family game nights and workshops such as parenting skills and stress management.
- Measurable: Aim for 60% of enrolled families to participate in 1 or more activity each academic year.
Buddy Systems 📽️
- Specific: Implement “Buddy Systems” that foster cross-grade student mentoring and crafted recess activities to foster social skills.
- Measurable: Aim for 80% of students to report that they have 1 or more close friend(s) on surveys.
School-Based Mentorships
- Specific: Assign each student a teacher or staff member as a mentor for weekly check-ins.
- Measurable: Assure 100% of students are matched with an adult. Aim for 70% of students to report feeling supported by 1 or more non-family adult(s) on surveys.
Cultivate an Anti-Bullying Culture
- Specific: Create anti-bullying campaigns, and appropriate group therapy sessions that meet weekly for at least 30 minutes.
- Measurable: Aim for 85% of students reporting, “I feel I belong at this school” on surveys.
Teach Awareness and Control Over Our Bodies 📽️
- Specific: Recruit local specialized teachers to offer yoga and martial arts as PE courses to take for credit, especially in high-crime neighborhoods.
- Measurable: Aim for 80% of identified at-risk students to be enrolled and 90% of them to report feeling safe on surveys.
Student Co-Founded Clubs
- Specific: Allow students to be involved with the formation of clubs that will meet weekly.
- Measurable: Aim for 80% of students to report “I do things that I enjoy at school” on surveys.
Service-Based Project Learning 📽️
- Specific: Integrate service-learning projects into curricula. Examples include community gardens, cross-generational pen pals, crafting and installing green power sources.
- Measurable: 100% of classrooms complete 2 or more projects every academic year.
The Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound aspects of the above school-based programs:
Achievable: Launch anonymous students surveys in grades 3-12 in the Fall, the perform progress checks via biannual surveys and focus groups. Use Title IV grants for mental health programs and community partnerships. Desegregate data to assess and address gaps.
Relevant: Launching these programs targets all seven areas of Positive Childhood Experiences simultaneously through school culture, policies, and partnerships. A rural school in Vermont launched a similar plan and saw a 40% drop in disciplinary referrals within 2 years.
Time-Bound: Implement evidence-based programs such as the ones listed by the end of 1 academic school year to ensure 90% of students report experiencing all 7 PCEs with a 25% increase in reported PCEs compared to baseline data collected in the Fall.