Earlier this month one of our grantee partners, Girlstart, shared an exciting update on a STEM study they participated in and this news was too good to keep to ourselves!! Girlstart participated in a benchmark study, NASA's Summer of Innovation Project, identifying 50 best practices in providing out-of-school time STEM programming to at-risk 4th-9th grade students. This study was in response to President Barack Obama's 2009 Educate to Innovate campaign, designed to provide thousands of middles school students and teachers across the US with exciting out-of-school-time STEM activities and projects. Through Summer of Innovation, NASA calls on all partners representing governments at every level, nonprofits, universities and schools to expand the opportunity for more young people to aspire and engage in the prosperity of not only their future, but the future of our nation.
We're honored to be part of this study that highlights best practices in out-of-school time STEM education programs. We've always felt that Girlstart's work is of national caliber, and we're gratified that organizations like Booz Allen Hamilton share our belief. By participating in this national conversation about why STEM education is important for girls, and how organizations like Girlstart can build the capacity of communities to improve its future STEM workers, we hope that we can also highlight Austin as an exceptional environment in which to incubate high-impact programs.
The study explores some of Girlstart's deep-seated principles about the 'what' of our work as well as the 'how' of what we do. In addition, this study shows a little about we have been able to deliver 'Girlstart to Go' programs in other communities across America by developing strong partnerships and collaborations.
Tamara Hudgins, Ph.D., Executive Director of Girlstart
This report captures the current state of STEM education in America, elaborates on the potential for out-of-school-time STEM to mitigate the STEM education crisis and illuminates best practices in building, sustaining and scaling successful STEM program.
Click here for the benchmark link and prepare to launch into a rich set of successful strategies in engaging students in STEM. Many thanks to Girlstart for sharing this publication and helping build upon best practices in the field of OST and STEM!!
In lean times, as lawmakers favor stop-gap savings over long-term, strategic investment, it takes courage to be a voice for children.
That voice was lifted last spring, but not yet audibly enough to fill—and reverberate across—the domed ceilings of the capitol.
This coming year, it must be different.
Across the state, lawmakers eliminated billions from public education, cutting funds to K-12 districts in every region; special programs, including pre-kindergarten programs, dropout prevention and teacher training; and college scholarships for low-income youth. In the seven Central Texas counties of Bastrop, Caldwell, Hays, Gillespie, Gonzales, Travis and Williamson, where schools serve forty percent more children than they did just ten years ago, the Texas legislature cut over $300 million from public schools for the biennium.
And these cuts weren’t made in a vacuum. Texas already ranks about 40th in per pupil spending and pays teachers less on average then 30 other states. Despite gains, we face persistent problems with equity: property poor and property wealthy districts from one neighborhood to another are often separated by thousands of dollars difference in per student spending. These differences matter very much for children. At every school level in Texas, children who attend high-poverty have less access to teacher quality than their peers in low-poverty schools.
Changing course, making the success of all Texas children a top priority, will require bold leadership. At IDRA, we are working to develop a set of tools to support such leadership. Here is a snapshot of three such tools.
Three New Tools for Strengthening Texas Education
(1)Online Interactive Data Maps: How Much Revenue was Cut?
Two interactive data maps are designed to provide searchable information on the total revenue loss for schools by Texas county and district (2011 to 2013). Built on a Google platform, these maps can be placed (and fully function) on almost any website, providing a resources that people around the stat
e can use and share to answer one of the first questions emerging from the 2011 session: How much rev
(2)SB1 Funding for the Biennium in IDRA’s Our School Portal– How much revenue was cut? How does this relate to other school district data?
IDRA’s OurSchool portal provides data on a set of key indicators for every public school district in the state. Launched in 2005, this bilingual (Spanish/English), web-based portal is organized around IDRA’s Quality Schools Action Framework – an action model that engages school, community, and family partners in examining at key data and developing a joint action plan for improving the quality of public schooling. This fall, IDRA added searchable data on revenue changes resulting from SB1, and through the portal, has coupled this new data with existing information on student demographics, curriculum quality and college readiness. To register, visit Our School Portal.
(3)School Funding Crowdmap How Are Funding Cuts Affecting Your School?
IDRA’s School Funding Crowdmap– harnesses the power of crowdsourcing to capture how funding cuts to education are impacting their local schools and communities. The publicly-generated map is being used by family leaders to post reports of how funding cuts are already impacting teaching quality, transportation access, and student supports. Teachers are sharing how funding cuts impact class sizes and materials and school leaders are describing how cuts are affecting their capacity to provide for a high quality education for all children. The map is meant as a tool for community-based leadership, stories can be downloaded and printed as part of a toolkit in making the case for excellent, equitable education. To add your story to the map, visit https://schoolfunding.crowdmap.com.
Each of these tools was piloted in the fall through a series of roundtable gatherings with education, community, business, and family leaders in Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, El Paso, the lower Rio Grande Valley, Houston, and San Antonio, as part of Fair Funding Now!, a partnership with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Mexican American School Board Members Association (MASBA) and Texas Center for Educational Policy (TCEP). As a next step, we hope to refine them and roll them out statewide.
From caring comes courage
When policymaking has shifted away from what matters most--making sure that every child in Texas has access to a high quality education--courage and leadership can re-set the compass. Lao Tzu said “from caring comes courage.” Family, community and education leaders of Texas are sure to have courage, since certainly we care, abundantly, for our children.
Laurie Posner, M.P.A., is an IDRA senior education associate. She has made a career commitment to community-based problem solving and initiatives that address social and economic inequities and we are very appreciative of her time and work to share with other education advocates the interactive tools and data organized by IDRA, an independent, private non-profit organization, dedicated to strengthening public schools to work for all children.
For this week's blog we are excited and proud to feature KDK-Harman board member, Jo Ivester, as she shares her personal story of deciding to become an educator with graduate students of Stanford University. After years of working in the public and private sectors, Jo Ivester, MBA '81, decided to become an educator and continue the family legacy upholding the value in education.
Watch her YouTube video below as she discusses her journey to a career of service in teaching and her upcoming book, TheOutskirts of Hope. Currently, Jo is a professor teaching business statistics and operations management at St. Edwards University in Austin, Texas, and continues to pass on the inspiration of teaching to future generations.
by Nicole Watson, Nonprofiteer. Longhorn. Texan. Social Media Extraordinaire.
Many nonprofit organizations are using social media as a way to build awareness of their mission, call for volunteers, connect with supporters, promote events, collaborate with similar organizations, share information and raise funds.
But most of them aren’t using it strategically.
A very important, but often overlooked, step in using social media for social impact is to create a Social Media Plan. Your Social Media Plan works like a map and will help guide your organization to determine the best way to make it successful.
If you have never created one before or don’t know where to begin, I’ve come up with some simple steps to get you going:
Determine the right mix for your organization. Before you take a dive into all the types of social media, take a look at how they work and the types of audiences that use them. Then figure out which ones will work best for your organization. Not all of the tools out there work best for all organizations.
Decide how you want your brand to be perceived. This is a huge part of your plan and it should not be overlooked. Your brand is like your organization’s personality. Come up with some words that you want your brand to be known for. Do you want to be perceived as being really casual and quirky or do you want to be taken more seriously or seen as a thought leader.
Set goals and expectations. What do you want to get out of social media? Do you simply want to promote your activities or do you want to build a fundraising campaign. Also determine the types of information you want to share and how frequently you want to publish material. By setting goals and expectations you will easily be able to determine if your plan is working effectively.
Share your plan with your staff. Once you have your Social Media Plan created, go over it with your staff members and interns who will manage your accounts. Your brand is a very important part of your organization and once it’s tarnished it’s be really hard to fix. Before you let them loose, go over your branding with them and make sure they understand how you want to be viewed.
Incorporate social media into your existing marketing plan. Social media should be a supporting part of your marketing. Once you get your social media tools going and feel comfortable, add your information to your website and marketing materials. This will make it easier for your supporters and donors to keep up with you and allow you to build a relationship with them.
Some Helpful Tips on How to Use Social Media Effectively
Commit the time. You don’t have to commit a lot of time, but it will require some time if you want to do it right. If you’re new to it take it slow and get comfortable using one tool before you add on another.
Use available resources. There are tons of create resources like TweetDeck, HootSuite and Seesmic easier to manage your social media efforts.
Explore how other nonprofits use it. Take a look at what similar organizations are using and find out what will work best for you.
Quality vs. Quantity. Don’t post tons of information just for the sake of posting. If you don’t have anything relevant, don’t post it. Your message will be lost and you will become ignored if you post too much.
Engage your audience and listen. Social media is all about the conversation and you there’s no fun in only conversing with yourself. Ask questions, respond to supporters, share partner organization’s information and post relevant material to your audience.
If there is one thing you should take away from this post, it is this: if you aren’t using strategic about how you use social media, then you aren’t getting the most out of it. Creating a Social Media Plan doesn’t take a lot of work, but it will make your efforts much more successful in the long run.
Nicole Watson, also famously known online as @nonprofitnicole, is a marketing and communications specialist who has running track record of training and consulting Texas nonprofits on effective ways and practices to drive social good messages utilizing social media platforms. In 2011, Nicole partnered with KDK-Harman and our grantee partners focused on developing online organizational brand and presence. Passionate about community service and volunteerism, Nicole has held various leadership positions at OneStar Foundation and served as previous chair of the Young Professionals for the Cure at Komen Austin. Currently, Nicole is Marketing Manager at Tango Health, Inc.
Foundations & nonprofits alike hone in the power of social media
By Mary Verhaeghe, KDK-Harman Foundation
Happy New Year’s everyone! We’d like to start the year off with a month of blogs about technology for nonprofits. The first blog of the year is about social media and what it can do for your nonprofit organization. KDK-Harman started signing up for social media accounts about mid-year in 2011. We signed up with Facebook, then we added Twitter to tweet about what was on our Facebook, added Blogging to our website, and started tweeting about our Blogs, and then adding videos to YouTube and socializing on Linkedin, etc. We then hooked into HootSuite, which is a dashboard to manage all our social media accounts. It sounds like a lot, and it is at first, but once you’re up and running, you can easily start socializing your cause across the internet and actually keep track of how many people you’re truly reaching through social media.
KDK-Harman found that social media is one of many great tools to keep track of what is going on in the arena of education in and beyond Central Texas. In addition to keeping abreast of education news at local, state and national levels, social media has enabled real-time, two and sometimes three-way dialogue on strategies for breaking the cycle of poverty through education.
Social media is also a great tool for informing our nonprofit partners, funder colleagues, and education advocates of special events pertaining to education. It's proved to be an effective marketing tool. We found that it doesn’t matter how big or how small your organization is, when you decide on social media for your organization, it’s always about the content; keeping your audience interested in the subject at hand, and also making sure you’re targeting the people you want to target most on the subject matter at hand.
Below we've highlighted some 'go-to' websites we frequent for learning about social media for nonprofits and foundations. These sites will help you frame how social media can be a fit to your organizational need and reach. Also included in the list below are some PDF documents and books that talk about social media in nonprofits:
Remember when deciding to go to social media to get your cause known and what your organization is doing...you don’t have to spend a lot of money or even have an education in technology to learn what is already free on the Internet. Doing research on the Internet on how to use social media is all at your fingertips. All you have to do is start typing.
This is from our very first blog: “The KDK-Harman Foundation's social media networks will serve to inform and engage grantees, funders, policymakers, media, and education advocates about key issues, events, and policies as they relate to the Foundation's funding priorities and beliefs. Our intention is for our social media use to be more than just a one-way street in communication.”
As we head into 2012, we plan to utilize this as our overarching strategy in our social media communications. We hope you find this month's series in social media for nonprofits helpful and as always, we are open to learning more about "what works" for you furthering your mission & philanthropic endeavors!
To learn more about how KDK-Harman has embraced social media and capture pointers that were shared with us along the way, visit our Knowledge Center's Social Media Toolkit.
Mary Verhaeghe, most notably, is referred to as the "cornerstone" of KDK-Harman Foundation. She has supported the Harman family and the Foundation for almost seven years, stretching beyond the inception of the family foundation. In fall 2011, Mary formally joined the Foundation team utilizing her keen expertise in event planning, office management and technology. A champion of new media coupled with her passion to community, Mary enthusiastically embraces her role as a key contributor to ensuring all children have access to quality education.
Authors 
Earlier this month one of our grantee partners, Girlstart, shared an exciting update on a STEM study they participated in and this news was too good to keep to ourselves!! Girlstart participated in a benchmark study, NASA's Summer of Innovation Project, identifying 50 best practices in providing out-of-school time STEM programming to at-risk 4th-9th grade students. This study was in response to President Barack Obama's 2009 Educate to Innovate campaign, designed to provide thousands of middles school students and teachers across the US with exciting out-of-school-time STEM activities and projects. Through Summer of Innovation, NASA calls on all partners representing governments at every level, nonprofits, universities and schools to expand the opportunity for more young people to aspire and engage in the prosperity of not only their future, but the future of our nation.
KDK-Harman found that social media is one of many great tools to keep track of what is going on in the arena of education in and beyond Central Texas. In addition to keeping abreast of education news at local, state and national levels, social media has enabled real-time, two and sometimes three-way dialogue on strategies for breaking the cycle of poverty through education. 
