At the Achieve Brown County Collective Impact Partnership, we know real change happens when people come together to create it. That’s how Collaborative Action, one of our three core pillars, works to drive meaningful change. And this pillar is the guiding principle for our Reading for the Future Initiative action teams.
Our Reading for the Future Strategy Team informs the structure and direction of this Initiative. From its launch, this group of community Partners has focused on building trust and creating alignment on how we can all work together to ensure all young people in Brown County are reading at grade level by the end of third grade.
As this team listened to community needs and examined the literacy landscape across the county, a gap emerged: there was no shared way in Brown County to measure or track progress on how young people are engaging in activities that build literacy skills. Partners across sectors kept asking the same question: How do we know if our efforts (individually or collectively) are making an impact to improve reading scores?
To answer that, the Strategy Team set a big goal: design and launch an Early Literacy Dashboard to be used across Brown County.
Why a Dashboard?
This dashboard will serve as a collective resource for our community, helping us all align on what early literacy measures matter, from birth all the way through third grade. When we align on shared measures, we can track progress and hold each other accountable to shared results. From access to books and early education opportunities, to social and emotional support and family engagement, we’re in the infancy of developing what measures will be on the dashboard.
But we’re not building this dashboard in an echo chamber. The Reading for the Future Strategy Team is committed to embedding community voice into every step of the process. That includes engaging parents, educators, businesses, and organizations across Brown County to co-create the dashboard and ensure the measures on it reflect all corners of Brown County.
What Comes Next?
Developing this dashboard will take partnership. Over the coming months, the Reading for the Future Strategy Team and Backbone Staff at Achieve Brown County will be:
- Hosting input sessions with community members and organizations to inform the design of the dashboard and what early literacy indicators to include on it.
- Working to source data and secure data-sharing agreements.
- Beginning to analyze and visualize data which will lead to the phase one launch of the dashboard once we have a base of indicators ready to go.
- Facilitating action planning to set goals and targets for all the measures on the dashboard so we can hold ourselves accountable to progress and improvement.
The process is just as important as the product. By building this dashboard together, we’re strengthening relationships, shifting power dynamics, and creating a more connected system of support for young readers.
Why This Matters
This Early Literacy Dashboard will help all of us, action teams, community based organizations, community members and more, find places where we can take responsibility and action to improve agreed upon early literacy data measures.
This dashboard will support data measurement over time and lay out goals and targets for individuals and organizations across our community to help improve. It will ensure we have early literacy benchmarks all the way from birth to third grade to help our community know if we are on track with supporting young people to read at grade level by the end of third grade.
This is systems change in action and we’re just getting started.
Want to be part of the process?
Join an upcoming Early Literacy Dashboard Community Input Session.
At these sessions, individuals and organization representatives from across our community will learn more about Achieve Brown County’s goal to develop and launch an Early Literacy Dashboard in 2025 and be able to guide indicators tracked on this dashboard.