About Promise Neighborhoods | Program and partners

Our vision is to ensure all children growing up in Promise Neighborhoods have access to great schools and strong family and community support systems that will prepare them to attain an excellent education and successfully transition to college and a career.

As a place-based program, a Promise Neighborhood is both a place and a set of strategies. Because of inequitable and exclusionary practices, many people living in the footprint of a Promise Neighborhood have experienced economic distress and its consequences. These communities may face inadequate access to high-quality early learning opportunities, struggling schools, low rates of high school and college graduation, high rates of unemployment, high rates of crime, and indicators of poor health. Nonprofit organizations, institutions of higher education, and Indian/Native American Tribes that receive U.S. Department of Education’s 5-year implementation grants serve as a backbone organization to anchor the Promise Neighborhood in a community. Grantees and community partners build a Promise Neighborhood as unique as the community itself.

A Promise Neighborhood is also a set of strategies for addressing the issues faced by the community. Strong lead organizations and partners work to ensure that over time all children in a Promise Neighborhood have access to a continuum of solutions, or a pipeline, that support them from cradle to career. By braiding federal and other resources, communities can create opportunity and achieve better results for all. Promise Neighborhoods build pipelines of solutions to ensure children and youth in distressed communities can succeed in school and beyond. The pipeline is part of a multiagency strategy to address struggling schools, high unemployment, inaccessible housing, persistent crime, and other problems resulting from systematically underresourced neighborhoods.

The Promise Neighborhoods program builds on the Results-Based Accountability framework, with 10 results each community aims to achieve, from children being ready for kindergarten to families and community members supporting learning in Promise Neighborhoods schools. Grantees measure progress in achieving these results using associated indicators. The Promise Neighborhoods program also recognizes that each community is unique and provides flexibility in how the results are achieved.

Partners

The Promise Neighborhoods program is proud to have many training and technical assistance (TTA) and national partners to support grantees’ work in their communities. The TTA team, led by Westat Insight and the Urban Institute, supports grantees throughout their grants by providing tools, resources, workshops, facilitated communities of practice, and one-to-one support. Additional TTA partners include Clear Impact, the Center for the Study of Social Policy, Tribal Tech, Sanametrix, and providers that offer a suite of specialized supports for grantees, including data analysis and project management support, sustainability planning, and virtual courses. TTA partner Institute for Educational Leadership focuses its support on Full-Service Community Schools (FSCS), another U.S. Department of Education place-based program centered in a single school and community. National partners for Promise Neighborhoods and FSCS include the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, the U.S. Department of Justice, Child Trends, Coalition for Community Schools, and the Learning Policy Institute. Click a category and scroll to learn about TTA and national partners.

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