Ensuring healthy futures by supporting education from cradle to college

In Rhode Island, as in the nation as a whole, the County Health Rankings model documents that the education level a person ultimately achieves affects that person's health behaviors, access to health care, and health outcomes. Raising awareness about the strong links between educational achievement and health among a broad range of city and state stakeholders from education, health, business, and elsewhere in the community can help engage new champions and achieve collective impact.

The Healthy Futures: Education from Cradle to College project is working with several existing coalitions to improve education outcomes for children and youth in Providence and throughout the State of Rhode Island. These coalitions include the Providence Children and Youth Cabinet, the College Access Work Group, and the Rhode Island Early Learning Council. Policy and system change goals focus on not just one step on the education ladder, but on making improvements across the entire educational spectrum and include increasing access to pre-kindergarten and full-day kindergarten, supporting the development of a statewide early warning system to identify and intervene with students at risk of dropping out of high school, increasing the rigor of the high school curriculum, and increasing support for the college application process.

This session will discuss how the coalitions were established and maintained, how the linkages between education and health have strengthened the coalitions, the strategies employed to achieve the desired policy and system change outcomes, successes achieved thus far, and work still to come.