All students deserve a chance to learn and thrive. That conviction is at the core of everything we do at City Connects. It shapes our work, and has since the very beginning, 25 years ago.
To mark our milestone anniversary, we visited our origins, explored what we have learned about working in early childhood settings, and shared lessons about learning to scale effectively. We also looked at the power of our research-practice-partnership to refine the City Connects practice; ask and answer big questions about supporting child development, well-being, and learning; and provide insights into best practices for effective student support.
After all these years, our mission to help every student learn and thrive remains vital. Chronic absenteeism is on the rise. Changes add uncertainty to daily life. Out-of-school factors loom large for students.
That’s what continues to drive us into the future. Every child deserves to be seen, to be heard, to be supported, to be given opportunities to thrive. And City Connects will continue to help deliver hope, impact, and a brighter future.
Celebrating 25 Years of City Connects: How It Began
The aphorism that “it takes a village to raise a child” resonates because of its fundamental truth.
But how does a family find those resources and supportive relationships in the modern world? How can a new parent or someone new to the city, state, or country connect to the opportunities around them?
Those questions led Mary Walsh and colleagues to create City Connects. In this blog post, we explore early origins of the program and how conversations with administrators and community members proved to be important to its evolution.
Read more here.
A focus on early childhood settings
This blog post celebrates our 25th anniversary with a look at how City Connects has been adapted for early childhood settings and why providing supports early in life is so important.
We share what we have learned about working with our youngest children and their families to improve access to resources and open doors to opportunities and enrichments. And we look at the research on the power of opportunities to mitigate the effects of poverty on future educational achievement and earnings.
Learn more here about how City Connects is working to close opportunity gaps in the early childhood years.
Scaling City Connects
This blog post focuses on scaling City Connects and partnering to create Technical Assistance Centers. To scale, City Connects faced challenges common to many successful interventions: How could it support local staff in implementing the City Connects model with fidelity? And could positive student outcomes be replicated?
Learn more about how City Connects scaled here.
Our Research-Practice Partnership
City Connects began with a question: Could a school-based approach to supporting the whole child make a measurable difference? What started as a bold idea 25 years ago is now one of the most well-researched, data-backed models in the field of integrated student support.
The long-standing research-practice partnership between City Connects and the Center for Thriving Children at Boston College has helped answer that question, offering insight into what works, how to improve student support, and why it matters.
Learn more here about how this unique partnership continues to refine practice, drive national conversations, and offer students a stronger path to success.
Thank you for being part of our 25th anniversary celebration and for joining us on the journey to make a difference in the lives of students.
