National Center for Families Learning
By 2030, coordinated and aligned family learning systems are established in 60 communities, built with and for families, to increase education and economic outcomes, thereby creating more equitable communities.
Programs and results
What we aim to solve
NCFL advances the power of multigenerational education solutions in the fight against poverty. This approach is grounded in research that parenting adults have the greatest potential to most significantly impact and influence their children's life success and wellbeing. By bringing parenting adults and children together as co-learners and co-teachers, they practice and establish habits, routines, and skills that support the prosperity of the entire family. When parenting adults are achieving their education goals and engaging in their children's education, research shows that children are more likely to succeed academically, have less behavioural problems, better social emotional health, and improved health. NCFL partners with families and those who serve them to instill a multigeneratonal approach to education. NCFL engages with Hispanic, American Indian, and Black communities that confront multifaceted challenges contributing to entrenched poverty.
Our programs
What are the organization's current programs, how do they measure success, and who do the programs serve?
Family Literacy
NCFL provides a suite of research-based capacity-building offerings on its four-component Family Literacy model. The Family Literacy model is a holistic approach to supporting the educational and economic success of family members by bringing them together to engage in learning.
In alignment with federal law, NCFL defines family literacy as a continuum of services that address the multigenerational nature of literacy. Family literacy programs integrate (1) interactive literacy activities between parents and children; (2) support in parenting activities; (3) parent or family adult education and literacy activities that lead to readiness for postsecondary education or training, career advancement,
economic self-sufficiency, and personal goal attainment; and (4) age-appropriate education
to prepare children for success in school and life experiences.
Family Engagement in Education
NCFL provides training, coaching, and technical assistance to support effective family engagement in education. NCFL defines family engagement as the partnership between families and practitioners aimed at providing children and families with voice and agency throughout educational systems and within communities for the benefit of improving learning outcomes. NCFL’s family engagement programming offers dual capacity-building for practitioners and for family members spanning birth to adulthood,
Play with Purpose (birth-age 5): Play with Purpose is a facilitated playgroup that supports family relationship-building and child development through playbased learning.
P-12 District Family Engagement Model: This Model contributes a roadmap to the field
for how educators can create tangible, systemic strategies to drive equity-centered engagement with families.
Out-of-School Time Practices: NCFL creates resources and trainings to support family engagement outside of the classroom.
Family Leadership
NCFL defines family leadership as strategies and services that improve and enhance the leadership skills of parenting adults and that are designed to support families in becoming advocates for themselves, their families, and their communities. This work is accomplished alongside the education and community systems that serve them. NCFL’s family leadership efforts serve as a bridge to build more intentional parent-school-community partnerships that result in positive outcomes for children and families.
Activate! Local: Activate! Local is a project-based leadership model created specifically for parenting adults to identify and address critical issues within the school or community environment.
Activate! National: A year-long professional learning opportunity that connects locally based pairs of parenting adults and early childhood practitioners to co-design equitable practices that inform early childhood local, state, and national policies for early childhood systems.
Collaborative Community Models
Moving beyond isolated programmatic endeavors, NCFL’s vision will drive work designed to support the establishment of coordinated and aligned family learning systems in communities.
Family learning systems are dependent upon coalitions of institutions, organizations, community members, and families who engage in deep, comprehensive work bringing together a continuum of programs and resources— spanning birth through adulthood—in family literacy, family engagement, and family leadership.
Family learning systems are community-developed systems that provide aligned and coordinated high-impact, family-focused education practices serving the birth through adulthood continuum. These systems
include clear points of integration of family-focused programming across sectors, creating greater access and opportunity for families to easily engage.
Where we work
External reviews
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Our Sustainable Development Goals
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Goals & Strategy
Reports and documents
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Charting impact
Four powerful questions that require reflection about what really matters - results.
What is the organization aiming to accomplish?
NCFL’s vision is to establish aligned and coordinated family learning systems, built with and for families, across 60 locations nationwide by 2030, resulting in more equitable and thriving communities. Family learning systems are multigenerational education opportunities spanning the age continuum. They provide holistic, whole person development where individual system components interact in complementary ways to work toward shared outcomes. Our work is focused on supporting underrepresented and marginalized populations across the United States.
NCFL seeks to achieve the following high-level goals that support the broader organizational vision.
1) Parents, families, and community stakeholders will have greater capacity to enhance economic/education outcomes.
2) Communities will have aligned and coordinated services for children and families that focus on holistic development.
3) Effective multigenerational education practices and programs including family literacy, engagement, and leadership will be spread across communities.
What are the organization's key strategies for making this happen?
NCFL’s theory of change outlines specific actions in order to achieve our 60x30 vision.
Actions taking place within each community include:
1) Enhancing collaborative community models by creating strategic connections between family-focused services and programs while ensuring stakeholder input is inclusive and valued.
2) Implementing high impact multigenerational initiatives that adhere to NCFL’s Equity Design Principles.
3) Tracking and capturing family stories, data, and evaluation to share the impact of multigenerational learning.
4) Spreading and scaling effective policies, practices, and programs for family learning systems.
What are the organization's capabilities for doing this?
We have a 34-year history of developing and implementing family learning strategies and practices that bring real-world results to families and communities. We meet our goals through the following capabilities:
FAMILY LITERACY: Through partnerships with schools, libraries, community-based organizations, and other programs in communities across the country, parents and caregivers learn alongside their children, both in-person and virtually. We concurrently build the skills of the parents and caregivers as well as empower them with the tools to and confidence to engage in their children's education.
FAMILY ENGAGEMENT IN EDUCATION: Family engagement programming includes multi-generation learning opportunities, events, activities, and strategies that support children’s academic achievement and sometimes parent education.
FAMILY LEADERSHIP: Parent leadership programs are designed to activate the leadership skills of parenting adults by encouraging them to become engaged advocates for their community and organize to make a powerful, impactful change on education issues.
CROSS-SECTOR COMMUNITY COLLABORATIVES: Community collaboratives are comprised of organizations and local residents who seek to serve as catalysts for systemic change around issues that most impact family well-being. NCFL supports cross-sector collaborative efforts to meet the goal of building comprehensive family learning systems that are embedded at various levels in a community.
CO-DESIGNING: To truly meet the needs of the community for which services or resources are created, we collaborate with community members and key stakeholders to provide input on those services and resources.
FAMILY SERVICE LEARNING: The NCFL Family Service Learning model combines family learning with service learning in an effort to build stronger communities by fostering leadership and advocacy skills for families. Through the NCFL Family Service Learning six-step process, families explore solutions to community issues, conduct root-cause analysis, develop advocacy skills, and solidify and sustain new community partnerships.
LANGUAGE JUSTICE: Rather than just providing interpretation for the non-English speakers, language justice (simultaneous interpretation) encourages participants to speak in the language that best conveys their full ideas and expressions in their preferred language, providing interpretation for everyone, not just the non-English speakers. Language justice allows programs to benefit from the wisdom and experience of community leaders and parents who have in the past experienced language as a barrier to their leadership and voice.
What have they accomplished so far and what's next?
How we listen
Seeking feedback from people served makes programs more responsive and effective. Here’s how this organization is listening.
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How is your organization using feedback from the people you serve?
To identify and remedy poor client service experiences, To identify bright spots and enhance positive service experiences, To make fundamental changes to our programs and/or operations, To inform the development of new programs/projects, To identify where we are less inclusive or equitable across demographic groups, To strengthen relationships with the people we serve, To understand people's needs and how we can help them achieve their goals
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Which of the following feedback practices does your organization routinely carry out?
We collect feedback from the people we serve at least annually, We take steps to get feedback from marginalized or under-represented people, We aim to collect feedback from as many people we serve as possible, We take steps to ensure people feel comfortable being honest with us, We look for patterns in feedback based on demographics (e.g., race, age, gender, etc.), We look for patterns in feedback based on people’s interactions with us (e.g., site, frequency of service, etc.), We engage the people who provide feedback in looking for ways we can improve in response, We act on the feedback we receive, We share the feedback we received with the people we serve, We tell the people who gave us feedback how we acted on their feedback
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What challenges does the organization face when collecting feedback?
We don’t have the right technology to collect and aggregate feedback efficiently, The people we serve tell us they find data collection burdensome, It is difficult to find the ongoing funding to support feedback collection
Financials
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Operations
The people, governance practices, and partners that make the organization tick.
Connect with nonprofit leaders
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- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
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Connect with nonprofit leaders
SubscribeBuild relationships with key people who manage and lead nonprofit organizations with GuideStar Pro. Try a low commitment monthly plan today.
- Analyze a variety of pre-calculated financial metrics
- Access beautifully interactive analysis and comparison tools
- Compare nonprofit financials to similar organizations
Want to see how you can enhance your nonprofit research and unlock more insights? Learn More about GuideStar Pro.
National Center for Families Learning
Board of directorsas of 11/17/2023
Mr. Richard Barr
Sharon Darling
National Center for Families Learning
Richard E. Barr
Retired, Airline Operations, UPS
Vikki Katz, Ph.D.
Chapman School of Communication
Mary Gwen Wheeler
Education Policy Strategist
Christopher Lehman
The Educator Collaborative
E. Susan Gourley, Ph.D.
Retired, Lincoln Public Schools
Nicole M. Chestang
Chestang and Associates, LLC
Jay W. Warren
PPL Corporation
Deenie Espinoza
Former Family Literacy Student / Pima Community College
Candy Magana
Humana, Inc.
Captain Houston Mills
UPS
Meredith Parente
Retired, Brown-Forman Corporation
Holly Walters
Toyota Motor North America
Board leadership practices
GuideStar worked with BoardSource, the national leader in nonprofit board leadership and governance, to create this section.
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Board orientation and education
Does the board conduct a formal orientation for new board members and require all board members to sign a written agreement regarding their roles, responsibilities, and expectations? Yes -
CEO oversight
Has the board conducted a formal, written assessment of the chief executive within the past year ? Yes -
Ethics and transparency
Have the board and senior staff reviewed the conflict-of-interest policy and completed and signed disclosure statements in the past year? Yes -
Board composition
Does the board ensure an inclusive board member recruitment process that results in diversity of thought and leadership? Yes -
Board performance
Has the board conducted a formal, written self-assessment of its performance within the past three years? No
Organizational demographics
Who works and leads organizations that serve our diverse communities? Candid partnered with CHANGE Philanthropy on this demographic section.
Leadership
The organization's leader identifies as:
Race & ethnicity
Gender identity
Transgender Identity
Sexual orientation
No data
Disability
No data
Equity strategies
Last updated: 11/10/2023GuideStar partnered with Equity in the Center - an organization that works to shift mindsets, practices, and systems to increase racial equity - to create this section. Learn more
- We review compensation data across the organization (and by staff levels) to identify disparities by race.
- We ask team members to identify racial disparities in their programs and / or portfolios.
- We employ non-traditional ways of gathering feedback on programs and trainings, which may include interviews, roundtables, and external reviews with/by community stakeholders.
- We have long-term strategic plans and measurable goals for creating a culture such that one’s race identity has no influence on how they fare within the organization.
- We use a vetting process to identify vendors and partners that share our commitment to race equity.
- We have a promotion process that anticipates and mitigates implicit and explicit biases about people of color serving in leadership positions.
- We seek individuals from various race backgrounds for board and executive director/CEO positions within our organization.
- We have community representation at the board level, either on the board itself or through a community advisory board.
- We help senior leadership understand how to be inclusive leaders with learning approaches that emphasize reflection, iteration, and adaptability.
- We measure and then disaggregate job satisfaction and retention data by race, function, level, and/or team.
- We engage everyone, from the board to staff levels of the organization, in race equity work and ensure that individuals understand their roles in creating culture such that one’s race identity has no influence on how they fare within the organization.