What is the Campus of Care Collaborative?
The Campus of Care Collaborative aims to reduce racial and ethnic inequities in education and health by 1) increasing the number of formerly isolated families who make use of available services that can positively impact their children’s health and education outcomes, and 2) enhancing the impact of available services through improved coordination, on the Bromley-Heath and South Street public housing campuses in Jamaica Plain. Once it is operational, parents and residents will have more of a one-stop-shopping experience when it comes to available services for their children and families than they may currently experience. Participants will also experience easier access and support to those services and resources, as well as improved support with follow-up.
Who are the Partners?
With support from Boston’s Children’s Hospital and Health Resources in Action, the partnership includes three Jamaica Plain organizations: Nurtury, Inc., a school-readiness program in the process of opening a state-of-the-art early education and research facility on the Bromley-Heath campus; Smart from the Start, a family support, community engagement and school readiness program whose mission is to prevent the achievement gap among children living in public housing; and Jamaica Plain Coalition: Tree of Life/Arbol de Vida, a BACH affiliated coalition of health and human service providers, headquartered in Bromley-Heath, that focuses on public health issues, including overseeing a mentoring program for middle school-age youth.
How was the Campus of Care Formed?
In 2010, Boston Children’s Hospital collaborated with MDPH and Boston Alliance for Community Health (BACH) on a Determination of Need (DoN) community planning process in connection with the construction of an extension to Children’s main clinical building. This process resulted in an agreement to disburse DoN Community Health Initiative funds to 18 community-based organizations/ initiatives that would explore the benefits of an intentional, multi-sector approach to improving the health status of children and families.
Participating organizations were required to submit two progress reports a year and encouraged to participate in a Learning Collaborative that meets twice a year to share information and look for opportunities for cross-sector collaboration. As a result of these meetings, three participating organizations began exploring whether, by collaborating, they could improve the collective reach and impact that they were having in public housing developments that they had been serving independently.
Their interest in coordinating services for children at the pre- and middle-school levels came about, in part, because all three agencies were aware that the Boston Housing Authority (BHA) and Boston Public Schools (BPS) had commissioned a study, Pathway to Success, that pointed out that children living in BHA developments do not perform as well academically as their non-public housing peers. Shortly after the study was completed, however, cuts to BHA’s budget greatly diminished its ability to respond to the findings.
This coincided with a second round of DoN funding resulting from changes to Children’s original expansion project. Nurtury, Smart from the Start, and the JP Coalition collaborated on a proposal to make use of those funds to form a “Campus of Care Collaborative” to improve educational outcomes in the Bromley Health and South Street developments by, providing coordinated support and expanded care to pre-schoolers who are at risk of a delayed start and middle-schoolers who are at risk of being diverted from their pathway to success.
Next Steps
This initiative is already under way and will receive $340,000 from the Children’s DoN over the next five years. The three organizations are currently working with Boston Children’s Hospital and Health Resources in Action to determine how to measure the effectiveness of the Collaborative as well as the impact that the collaborative efforts have on participating children and families.