Untapped Potential: Partnering with Community-Based Organizations to Support Participation of Lower-Incidence Immigrant Communities in the Illinois Preschool for All Initiative

Untapped Potential: Partnering with Community-Based Organizations to Support Participation of Lower-Incidence Immigrant Communities in the Illinois Preschool for All Initiative 1 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This report was made possible by a grant from the McCormick Foundation. The contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do not represent the official views of the Foundation, nor does publication in any way constitute an endorsement by the Foundation. Gina Adams was the principal investigator for this study, with Marla McDaniel serving as project director. In addition to extending our deepest thanks to our funders, we would also like to express our appreciation to Jennifer Kons and her colleagues at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR), who helped recruit and host the focus groups; and to Jennifer Kons of ICIRR, Choua Vue of Illinois Action for Children, and Jana Fleming of the Erikson Institute, all of whom commented on earlier drafts. Finally, we would like to extend our most sincere gratitude to the individuals from the immigrant-serving community-based organizations who generously shared their time and expertise to participate in the focus groups, and those individuals in other community outreach programs who agreed to be interviewed for the report. 3 INTRODUCTION - --—-1 in the size and density of their population, in their race and ethnicity, length of time in the U.S., in whether they are U.S. citizens or legal residents2, and in their English proficiency. 34 4 These studies found some significant barriers for lower-incidence families, including that a number of parents did not know about the PFA program, parents who did know about PFA were likely to report language and logistical challenges, and some parents reported that they used intermediary organizations to help them overcome these challenges. In response to these findings, key stakeholders in Illinois asked UI researchers to identify strategies that the PFA community could employ to support effective outreach to these communities. As a result of this request, we conducted focus groups and interviews with a number of community-based organizations (CBOs) serving immigrant and refugee populations in the Chicago area, as well as organizations focusing on outreach to immigrant parents around early care and education. This report summarizes the findings from these discussions. It is important to recognize that the PFA program has limited funding, which means that many programs have waiting lists and families seeking services may be turned away. This reality makes a focus on outreach somewhat counterintuitive. However, our initial conversations with key stakeholders suggested it was still important to expand outreach efforts to this population because  Those immigrant families who are least likely to know about the PFA may also be those who are most isolated due to language, cultural, and other barriers, and whose children may therefore be at particular risk of facing challenges in school. As such, they are precisely the families who the PFA program was designed to serve, and failure to reach out to them may mean that their children end up behind when they enter school.  Local PFA programs now face a new requirement that 80 percent of the children they serve must be “at-risk,” with one of the criteria being that children’s home language is not English. These means that local PFA providers have a stronger incentive to find ways to reach out in targeted ways to communities to meet the 80 percent requirement. As a result, stakeholders felt that regardless of funding limitations it was important to identify strategies to expand outreach to immigrant families, and to address the particular barriers facing lower-incidence immigrant groups. Below we first summarize our key findings, provide some background on our study respondents and the questions we asked, and present our key findings in more detail. 5 SUMMARY OF KEY FINDINGS  Many (though not all) CBOs serving lower-incidence immigrant communities are unfamiliar with PFA. Even those that knew about it in general had many questions about the specifics of enrollment, eligibility, availability, etc. This suggests that outreach to the CBOs directly could be an important component of outreach efforts to these communities.  Once these CBOs understood more fully what PFA offered families, they expressed interest in being involved. They were interested for several reasons: first, because they understood the importance of early education for the success of their families; second, because it fulfilled their