Elon Service Year Fellows

Since 2015, Elon University has been working with five Alamance County agencies to foster an impactful partnership between the university and the community. Not only has this association helped to make Elon students more aware of their surrounding community, but it has also given them a way to engage in a meaningful year of service.

The agencies in Alamance County that are connected with the project include: Alamance Achieves, the Alamance County Health Department, Healthy Alamance, the Healthy Communities department at Alamance Regional Medical Center and Impact Alamance.

Each year, six recent Elon University graduates begin a 12-month long position with one of these agencies to help address the health and education disparities in Alamance County. Sylvia Ellington is one of two 2020-2021 fellows working with Alamance Achieves as the Kenan Community Impact Fellow.

She describes her role as to create relationships in the community by looking at who Alamance Achieves is currently working with and who they aren’t to build meaningful partnerships with the community and other agencies. “It’s important to have relationships with people from different sectors — business, education, health care — and work to build on those relationships.”

A major component of Ellington’s work involves social media and getting the word out about Alamance Achieves’ efforts. Plans are in the works to launch a podcast that will share more about Alamance Achieves’ Voices in the Community project “We’re helping to write and create a story about what systems change is and what Alamance Achieves is doing to create systems change,” she explains, adding that the podcast will be one way to inform the community about how they can participate.

The Fellows program is open to any graduated Elon University senior, regardless of their program of study. “The work of each of the agencies spans so many sectors, it’s valuable to have a variety of fellows at the table, and it’s an opportunity for them to make the experience their own depending on what they are interested in,” Ellington says.

While the pandemic has led to a slight shift in efforts, Ellington shares that if anything it has crystallized the need for greater equity and accessibility in Alamance County. “Even before I came on last June, Alamance Achieves was shifting their efforts to meet more immediate needs like delivering meals and strengthening the Kindergarten Readiness Network, as well as offering ways to help parents cope with stress and issues surrounding remote learning.” Another example of this is a joint effort with Healthy Alamance to provide more accessibility to COVID-19 testing across Alamance County.

For the remainder of Ellington’s fellowship, she says the plan is to continue to focus on racial equity and the disparities in outcomes for black and brown children. Additionally, she will be assisting in strategizing next steps based on Alamance Achieves’ findings from their Community Voices project.

Although Ellington lived in Alamance County prior to attending Elon University, she has found her fellowship to be an eye-opening experience. “I’ve learned every day that things aren’t always what they seem. I’ve had the opportunity to meet and work with cool people who are doing awesome work. The underlying theme for the program and people who choose to be a part of it is that we share this dream for a better Alamance County where people are thriving, and I’m excited to join a community of people who are ready to make that possible,” she says.

What is Community Voice?

Alamance Achieves mission is to improve educational opportunities for every child in Alamance County by connecting community members so they can work together to develop solutions. The beauty of this work is it is owned by everyone. And when we succeed in creating a reliable grid of resources, or charging stations, to strengthen our ability to support children from cradle to career, all of us benefit.

Community Voice Project

To ensure that every child in Alamance County has access to the resources they need requires focusing on the project’s themes: racial equity and co-development with the to uplift the assets that already exist. 

We know that the community’s need to be empowered. Too often, the odds are stacked against these communities, and Alamance Achieves wants to work with them so they’re uplifted and can help build a better system. To accomplish this, we’ve created the Community Voice Project. The goal is to talk to residents of Alamance County to learn what goals and outcomes are shared, how students are currently experiencing the schools and what other feedback the community has about early health and wellbeing, kindergarten readiness and more.

A Three-part Process

The project aims to bringing together innovative, equity minded community members, advocates and partners to build the blueprint of project planning and methodology to start. It is driven by the principals of Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR), which emphasizes joining with the community as full and equal partners in all aspects of the process. The CBPR approach strives to build on the existing strengths and resources a community brings to the table, as well as requiring a long-term commitment from everyone involved.

Next, Alamance Achieves will conduct listening sessions based on the recommendations of the group. Engaging with the community and the people impacted is essential to truly achieve effective systems change. Our listening sessions will be an opportunity to learn firsthand what are the unique opinions, ideas and concerns of families in Alamance County. Families of young children and students themselves are the true experts on the experiences surrounding education and health in our community. There words will guide what comes next.

The second step involves Alamance Achieves analyzing these insights we received from all of the participants we spoke to. Once this is done, we will be able to determine which needs should be prioritized, and we will have a better understanding of where the community is as a whole.

The third and final part of the process is creating partnerships aligned around the collective goals. This will include partnering with other organizations in the community to address the root causes behind the needs that have been raised and then intentionally working to change the structures that have made the system behave to create these issues in the first place.

The work that Alamance Achieves does won’t happen without the buy-in and support of the community. Listening to your voices, learning your needs and giving voice to your experiences is the backbone of our approach.

Training Educators to Create Change

Leading change in education is critical to increasing educational equity. With that goal in mind, the T.A.G. program was created. T.A.G. stands for Teachers Advocating to lead Great Change. It is an extension of the work of a collaboration between the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. and Delta Teacher Efficacy Campaign (DTEC) to raise awareness about the relationship between teacher efficacy and student achievement.

DTEC’s mission focuses on many topics, all through the lens of personal efficacy and confidence with the goal of equipping teachers to shift into teacher leadership and community advocacy and create a critical mass to lead change. T.A.G. is an extension of DTEC’s work that initially focused on educating educational stakeholders about ESSA, the Every Student Succeeds Act passed in 2015. The mission of ESSA is to ensure provisions for every school and so that every student in the country regardless of race, color, creed, religious preference, gender, socioeconomic status, disability, etc. receives an equitable education provided by a highly effective teacher.

T.A.G. 2.0 continues to focus on educational equity, however the implementation of ESSA is no longer the main focal point.

While North Carolina was not one of the original states selected to participate in T.A.G., the interest expressed by DTEC participants in North Carolina was so great that the program administration decided to add the state. 

Tia Gilliam-Wilson, a teacher at Elon Elementary, is one of the DTEC Change Agents. She participated in the first T.A.G. effort in North Carolina in 2015-2016 and has continued to be involved since then. “Each team comes up with what they want to focus on, so in North Carolina we’ve been focused on equity, social justice and leadership, among other topics,” she said. 

One of Gilliam-Wilson’s efforts was hosting a family literacy night at Elon Elementary pre-pandemic. She cited the valuable asset that Tyronna Hooker, executive director of Alamance Achieves, has been for T.A.G.’s local efforts, which directly connects to the Alamance Achieve’s efforts to help every child in Alamance County thrive. “I have reached out to Ty as a resource multiple times and she helped in so many ways, including as a panelist at events.”  

COVID-19 has altered T.A.G.’s work, but Gilliam-Wilson explained how they had worked to adapt. “Since COVID we’ve been using the StreamYard platform to post presentations as well as on Facebook and YouTube.”

Any individual or group who would like to connect with Change Agents in their area to partner with the team can text #JoinTag to 51555 to be connected to the team closest to them.

Holistically Improving Kid's Health

NC Integrated Care for Kids (NC InCK) model is partnering with five communities in central North Carolina, including Alamance County, to improve their quality of care over a seven-year period. NC InCK initiated planning in January 2020, and implementation of the model will run from 2022 until 2026.

By supporting and bridging a multitude of services where children live, learn and play, NC InCK’s child-centered model is focused on children insured by Medicaid or CHIP (NC Health Choice) from birth up through age 20. The services that NC InCK aims to integrate include physical and behavioral health, food, housing, early care and education, Title V, child welfare, mobile crisis response services, juvenile justice and legal aid. Caring for the whole child is at the heart of this initiative. That aligns with the goals of Alamance Achieves, which is assisting NC InCK with strategy on how to improve early childhood health and kindergarten readiness.

The NC InCK model brings together the leadership of families and children in five counties (Alamance, Durham, Granville, Orange and Vance), and Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), NC DHHS and many community partners that serve children and families. While Duke, UNC and NC Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) are the lead organizations, all Medicaid and CHIP-insured children in the five counties will be included no matter where they receive care.

Sarah Allin, InCK Operations Director, explained that because of how traditional health care is siloed, the big picture of a child’s well-being isn’t always clear. “When a six-year old comes to clinic, we focus on things like him being underweight for his age or missing his last well child check,” Allin said. “But we might be missing other important factors that impact a child’s well-being that might not be apparent.” She cited examples of the things that also impact a child’s health: he doesn’t always get breakfast, he misses a lot of school or his parent has recently been incarcerated. “Even not having reliable transportation — all of these things impact a child’s well-being,” she said. “It’s been hard to bring all this information together to understand what additional support kids and families need.”

The process starts with a more holistic assessment of the needs of kids. NC InCK has partnered with the NC DHHS to develop this fuller picture of support families need. Each family will then be assigned to one of three levels of needs. “Every family whose child has higher medical and social needs should have a quarterback, someone they can go to when they have a challenge,” Allin explained. Next, NC InCK will support the creation of a shared action plan for children who could benefit from having a strategy that brings the family and child together with key members of their child’s care team to determine the family’s goals and needs. 

Finally, new ways of paying for care will be developed. These alternative payment models will focus on improving child health and reducing costs of care, as well as linking payments to more meaningful measures of children’s health and social outcomes.

Empowering Youth in Alamance County

The initial goal behind the creation of the City of Burlington’s Youth Solutions in October 2019 was to reduce crime among the youth of Burlington, but its vision soon expanded.

Vanessa Diggs, Youth Solutions Coordinator for the City of Burlington, held forums to discover what youth in three specific communities—Beaumont, Housing Authority and Tucker—needed to provide balance in their lives.

“These kids are already living in fragile communities,” Diggs said. “These are marginalized communities, ones that have limited resources.” 

Diggs talked to kids in each community and came away impressed by the things they wanted to do. “We asked if they were interested in a youth group to meet once a week just to talk about things they would like to do and that evolved into youth leadership groups in each of the three communities,” she shared. Within those groups, Diggs said the kids initially talked about how they didn’t feel safe. She wanted to find ways to empower them by helping them determine what they could control in their communities.

While a majority of youth, even in marginalized neighborhoods are able to make it, the goal of Diggs’ work was to understand what was preventing all the youth from succeeding. 

She looked at the communities through the lens of the theory of resiliency, or how different youth handle adversity, by rating the positive and negative assets in a young person’s life that help to balance them. Diggs determined that the positive things Burlington youth needed in these three communities were a program they felt that they were leading and the opportunity to work and be successful in school.

With the help of Impact Alamance, Youth Solutions wrote a grant proposal for funding to help advance the different projects the three communities wanted to pursue. Meanwhile, Alamance Achieves partnered with Youth Solutions to address the needs of the younger kids in the three communities by bringing parents an early childhood reading program. When COVID-19 affected the incomes and food stability of many in the communities, Alamance Achieves also helped Youth Solutions by delivering boxes of food the United Way had collected. 

While the pandemic has altered much of Youth Solutions outreach efforts, the need remains. “We know where the marginalized communities are,” Diggs explained. “School data directs us — if someone is doing poorly in school, we need to find out how we can assist, what can we balance. We can’t change where a child lives, but we can look at that child and bring balance.”

What is Systems Change?

Big ideas can change the world. But first those big ideas have to be understood. Alamance Achieves believes in big ideas—like systems change. But to make those ideas a reality, it can be helpful to break down what exactly they mean.

A noun and a verb

Systems change is an action that we take. And it’s also the result of that action. It’s the process and the outcome. Solving a simple problem—like changing a lightbulb—doesn’t require a lot of effort or collaboration. You simply get a new bulb, take out the old one and screw in the new one. But what about something bigger, like rewiring a house? For that kind of big project you may need to call in an electrician, notify the power company and much more. 

The great news is we already have everything we need in our community to address and fix these bigger issues—we just have to harness our resources and take action. 

In essence, systems change strives to handle the root cause of a social issue, like education, by intentionally working to change the structures that have made the system behave in a certain way. Alamance Achieves believes that data is a valuable tool in this process. It not only helps by providing concrete numbers to illustrate an issue, but it also allows us to show the world how our efforts are working to make things better. Another way to promote the results we’ve achieved is through the use of personal stories and community narratives to create a community voice project. This gives members of the community a role and ownership in the work.

The principals of systems change

To bring about systems change requires planning and doing. Each can be broken down into three principles:

Planning

• Understanding the needs and what assets are available

• Engaging multiple partners who are interested in achieving the same results

• Mapping the existing systems to clearly see where the issues lie

Doing

• Performing the necessary tasks to handle the issues together

• Distributing leadership so everyone has a stake in the outcome

• Fostering a culture of openness, learning and responsiveness

The key is collaboration and clear communication. Systems change only happens when we build relationships with the people who are affected and work together to address the problems that are keeping us from reaching our ultimate goal.

strengthening connections for families

Bringing your baby home from the hospital is a time of joy. But it has also been shown to be a highly vulnerable time for families. Residents of Alamance County have expressed an interest in creating more robust ways of helping support local families. One way to do this is universal post-partum visits. Community partners including Jessica Johnson, with the Alamance County Health Department, have been exploring this idea.

Ensuring that every child in Alamance County has the best chance to succeed is at the heart of Alamance Achieves work to bring together our community and local organizations. Currently only Medicaid recipients in Alamance County receive a visit from one of Alamance County’s Health Department nurses after an infant is born. 

A team at the Health Department has been studying a visitation model created by Family Connects International as a possible way of expanding the home visit program so all families in Alamance County would receive at least one newborn home visit. The visits would be conducted by a nurse, who would perform a physical assessment on the baby and the mother. The physical would include weighing the baby, checking the mother’s blood pressure and asking questions to screen for postpartum depression. Additionally, if the mother is breastfeeding or had a C-section the nurse would ask about both. Finally, the nurse could connect the family to any resources they may need.

According to a randomized controlled trial Family Connects International conducted in 2014, their model showed:

• Families had 44% lower rates of Child Protective Services investigations for suspected child abuse or neglect through the second year of life.

• Community connections increased by 13%.

• Mothers were 30% less likely to experience possible postpartum depression or anxiety.

• Families were more likely to use out-of-home childcare.

• As the number of birth risks increased, infants experienced fewer emergency department visits but more hospital overnights.

• Mothers were more likely to complete their 6-week postpartum health check, but also had more emergency department visits.

The Alamance County Health Department has been working alongside community partners like local prenatal providers and pediatricians, mental health providers and early educators to co-design how an effective universal home visiting program would work in Alamance County. Like other Alamance Achieves partners working on systems change, the process of creating and aligning toward shared goals is crucial.

Johnson said, “Alamance Achieves have been amazing thought partners, helping to push for a community voice piece to make sure this is a program the community wants.”

A successful home visiting program will connect families to the specific services that Alamance County families need and want during the perinatal period. To understand which services are needed, a collaborative team of partners from the Health Department, Elon University, Cone Health, Alamance Achieves backbone staff and Elon-Alamance Health Partners have been conducting listening sessions with families to learn about the experience of bringing home a newborn in Alamance County — and to find out how receptive the families would be to the idea of postpartum home visits. The study was funded by the North Carolina Early Education Coalition and supported by Alamance Partnership for Children.

The program would go beyond home visits, by including a community alignment specialist position. This person would focus on working to improve the systems within Alamance County, including collecting data to see what resources worked well for families, where any gaps existed and which agencies had the capacity to take referrals. Johnson added, “The goal of the data would also be to increase program awareness and buy-in, so we can continue to create a better system that increases our capacity and learn from families about what resources they need during that vulnerable time.”

Recognizing the Community’s Need

The current need for food assistance in Alamance County is huge and honest, according to Lynne Pierce, executive director of Southern Alamance Family Empowerment (SAFE). “The community is just hurting — bottom line.” 

Started in 2013, after seven local churches had a conversation about the need for food assistance in Southern Alamance County, SAFE opened its doors to serve the public two days a week, on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Not only have they offered food since that time, but they have also met with those in need of their services once a month to learn about their needs and point them in the direction of other services that can help. For instance, SAFE partnered with an open door clinic to provide medical assistance to those who needed it.

Alamance Achieves first partnered with SAFE as part of an ad hoc committee on rural engagement that was started to find ways to better serve and reach the residents in Southern Alamance. Out of that relationship, SAFE started a summer food drive, to feed kids at eight elementary schools for the nine weeks they were out of school. SAFE established eight distribution spots. Due to COVID-19, it wasn’t possible to hand out actual food, so instead each family received a gift card for $25 per kid each week. More than 100 children a week received gift cards. 

SAFE’s efforts to care for kids in Southern Alamance also includes a summer meal program that they were able to set up on within two days of school closing in March. Since schools closed on March 17, they have provided about 3,000 bags of food. The enormity of the need is best explained by comparing the amount SAFE spend on food in 2019 — a little over $18,000 —with what they have spent in 2020 up until early October— more than $100,000. “When you give us money, we put it right back out in the community in food.” Additionally, on Thursdays SAFE’s Kids Bags have provided more than 3,000 bags of food, a program created due to the Summer Meal Program experience. 

The hope is SAFE can bring in enough donations to continue providing these bags of food to kids, without decreasing anything, as long as there is any form of virtual school going on.  

“The only way for us or any food pantry to be able to maintain and be of service is through donations,” Pierce explained. “Our community has been wonderful to us, and we are so grateful, but it’s not time to stop or let up.” She encourages people to donate, even if they can only afford a dollar or two because every penny adds up. “We’ve had neighborhoods do food drives. We’ll take any donations. We and other pantries need volunteers — you can sign up on our web page. We would love for people to work with us and the community and see firsthand the need,” she added.

“The only way for us or any food pantry to be able to maintain and be of service is through donations. Our community has been wonderful to us, and we are so grateful, but it’s not time to stop or let up.” —Lynne Pierce, executive director of Southern Alamance Family Empowerment (SAFE)

“If you don’t have enough food to feed your family, come and see us,” Pierce urged. “God has always seen fit to take care of us, our needs are always meet and we are here to help. You just show up and we will provide for you.” 

Interested in volunteering or donating? Call SAFE at 336-525-2120 or visit their website, www.safealamance.org, to learn more.