changing the landscape of racial equity.
STATEMENT OF commitment
Strategy Panel seats will be open to organizations who are committed to social justice, are participants in the changing landscape of racial equity in Forsyth County, and affirm the following commitments:
The Strategy Panel is made up of local organizations and institutions, the school district community groups, businesses, health organizations, faith-based organizations, and other community stakeholders and decision-makers. In true co-design model, as the Visionary Panel of parent leaders examine and deliberate on issues and barriers facing students and families to innovate culturally competent solutions, the Strategy Panel will receive the Visionary Board strategies and operationalize solutions for community-informed change through established organizations and systems serving the community.
01
We commit to eliminating disparities and achieving equity by providing all children with the resources they need to be ready to succeed in school.
02
We commit to incorporating the knowledge and lived experience of parents as experts on their children and communities into processes, systems, and Pre-K programs.
03
We commit to going beyond what has been done in the past by adopting new, creative, and effective ideas to enable us to achieve our vision of a community in which all children are able to succeed in school and in life.
04
We ground our work in the Whole School, Whole Child, Whole Community framework.
05
We center equity, inclusion, and justice.
justice,begins with educational equity.
The Priority Pre-K initiative is a grassroots public policy advocacy organization that is intentional, black-led, and multiracial. The goal of the Priority Pre-K program is to move towards justice, beginning with educational equity. High quality early learning lays the foundation for future success for all children. As an organization, we recognize that Pre-K is the starting point which sets children up for a successful future, and we aim to identify the barriers of registration to Pre-K for minority youth in Winston-Salem so we can break through them. We are an advocate, funder, convener, collaborator, and a catalyst for change in the community.
Pushing through the barriers to Pre-K registration includes identifying the structures and systems in place which have been and continue to perpetuate injustice against black and brown children. Many Black and low-income children are born into the trap of poverty in Winston-Salem / Forsyth County. This trap can lead to compounding negative effects which negatively affect a child’s development.
The best way to combat these negative and compounding oppressions is through systems change, which involves not only combatting the symptoms of oppression, but the root causes. Our goal is to enact policies that address systemic oppression in order to produce equitable outcomes & achieve social justice.
To begin this work, Pre-K priority centers the comprehensive well-being of the whole child. Our goal is to start while the child is in the womb. We must remove barriers to access for the parents as well as the child. It is our goal to inform, educate, and give agency to the child's family that will self-produce determination.