GRACE HILL SETTLEMENT HOUSE

Grace Hill Settlement House is a place-based social service and education organization that aims to impact the children, families and communities it serves in a comprehensive and coordinated fashion. With its base of 315 Head Start families, Grace Hill provides excellent early childhood education, works toward family economic and social stability goals, and engages the surrounding community in long-term neighborhood change efforts. This means that Head Start graduates are ready for kindergarten, families earn, maintain and grow enough income for long-term support, and communities can co-lead efforts to construct housing, public safety and other vital service capacities for sustainable neighborhood health.

In Head Start, Grace Hill's Kindergarten Readiness Framework works from national and local best practices to ensure that graduates are ready for kindergarten — measured through standardized testing in social, emotional and cognitive development. Grace Hill also ensures that children arrive ready to learn, working with families to stabilize housing, enhance income, and plan for long-term goals. In target low-income communities in North and South St. Louis City, where its Head Start centers/community hubs are located, Grace Hill also engages residents in leadership training — advocating for needed services, housing and built environment improvements, and volunteerism. This comprehensive and coordinated work focuses on the confluence of academic, economic and neighborhood improvement needed for long-term change.

Grace Hill operates two community-based hubs, each with over 100 Head Start and Early Head Start slots. Head Start is staffed by qualified teachers, teaching assistants, and case managers that work with families to accomplish their goals. These community hubs also convene on-site partner organizations like a credit union and job training agency to work with families toward long-term stability — as well as staffing Grace Hill services like emergency assistance and adult education classes that support families on this path. This collection of educators, nonprofit professionals, partner organizations, parents and neighborhood volunteers works together on setting impact benchmarks, leveraging resources into the centers, and responding to family/resident requests. Grace Hill continues to expand their reach in South St. Louis City — creating a model for place-based, wrap-around social service delivery that impacts the lives of children, their families, and their communities.

Over the past five years, Grace Hill has developed its community hub model for comprehensive and coordinated work. It continually strives to refine the ideal outcomes of its own services, leveraging partner organizations to fill needed gaps, and continuing to work as a cross-organizational team to change communities. This work is starting to show results for families in its North St. Louis City location, though much still needs to be done to adapt this model to South St. Louis City — which currently does not host as many partner organizations and shared outcomes. With a captive audience of Head Start children and their families, Grace Hill is now more heavily investing in two generation programming — as the well-being of children cannot be separated from the health of their caregivers. Soon, it will work on bundling its services to provide Head Start and community families with a more consistent, powerful set of programming that enhances financial stability and growth. In addition, Grace Hill is partnering with local elementary schools that are most frequently attended by Head Start children to continue the family support and engagement process — ensuring that children are kindergarten ready, then ready for middle school and beyond, while under-girding the long-term social and economic health of their caregivers.