Center for Community Impact
The Center for Community Impact (CCI) at Excellence encompasses three separate, yet very integrated initiatives geared towards empowering our families, community members, and scholars to become active citizens in advocacy, community engagement, and workforce development.
CCI initiatives include:
Family and Community Engagement (FACE)
Through FACE, the organization conducts community outreach to inform and connect families with available resourc and opportunities. The FACE team also supports recruitment for our schools, engages families in event that impact them, assists in times of hardship, and provides viable solutions to the challenges they face. The focus of the FACE team is to remove any barriers and provide pathways to agency.
Family Advocacy
ECS's advocacy program operates through a social justice lens. Our work empowers parents to recognize, secure, and leverage their financial, political, and social capital to address the inequities they face in their communities and ensure their interests are fairly represented. We teach families how to interpret and analyze policies, foster relationships, and engage with stakeholders in important community and policy issues so that they ca effect change. This important work educates and empowers families to raise awareness and find solutions to problems of which others may not be aware.
Community Learning Partners (CLP)
CLP is ECS’s newest initiative in which we leverage the expertise and skills of parents and community members by hiring them to work as ECS employees. ECS is tapping into this tremendous resource and matching credentials to organizational needs, which may include substitute teachers, tutors to mitigate learning loss, lunch and recess monitors, and office assistants. The CLP program was initiated as one solution to the national staffing shortages. However, the benefits are multifold and include improving economic outcomes, supporting our communities as a major employer, and increasing workforce development.