OUR VISION
Community-based solutions are central to any effort to achieve equity.
Our vision is to enable all children to achieve optimal health and wellbeing.
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Mission
The NOW Innovation Forum is a national network created to foster peer learning that empowers community-based efforts to succeed. The goal is to support the success of communities, community coalitions, and their regional or state-level partnerships to eliminate systemic barriers and lift up community-driven solutions.
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About NOW
NOW is comprised of two key components: NOW Innovation Forum and NOW Learning Community.
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The NOW Innovation Forum serves to promote shared learning and networking across the field by bringing together resources, stories, discussions, innovations, and other interactive tools in a central hub, to connect communities across the country that are working ensure all children and their families achieve optimal health and wellbeing.
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The NOW Learning Community will support 10 selected communities over 18 months to build essential knowledge, skills, and tools to scale and sustain equitable transformation of early childhood, education, and health systems in their neighborhood, city, or county. Each recipient will receive in-depth, tailored technical assistance in key capacity-building areas — such as utilizing equity tools and frameworks, mobilizing community leaders, using data and storytelling tools, and communicating with diverse stakeholders — in order to build a strong and healthy foundation for all children and families.
Key Partners
To implement the NOW initiative, Vital Village Network is working with four key partners who bring in rich expertise and experience in the focused capacity building areas:
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HOPE Consortium
The Vital Village Network is one of three partner organizations in the Harnessing Opportunity for Positive, Equitable Early Childhood Development (HOPE) Consortium, which includes the BUILD Initiative and Nemours Children's Health System and is supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). HOPE is designed to generate real progress toward equitable outcomes for young children (prenatal to age five) and their families by building the capacity of local communities, state leaders, cross-sector state teams, and local coalitions to prevent social adversities in early childhood and promote child wellbeing. HOPE aims to work with communities and states that have multi-sector coalitions, networks, or initiatives committed to reducing inequities by addressing early childhood adversity through systems alignment, policy, and capacity-building strategies, and will disseminate learnings from HOPE grantees to improve child wellbeing.
Each member of HOPE will work with a cohort of grantees comprised of local communities, states, and state leaders. Grantees will receive 18 months of collaborative learning with in-depth technical assistance for capacity building in measurement, evaluation, communication, and mobilization, along with peer learning, expanded networks, and opportunities to engage in a national forum and share and disseminate strategies. BUILD and Nemours are engaging with state-level early childhood leaders to advance this goal, and together, we are working to support the development of tools and strategies to promote communication, partnership, and alignment between city, county, and community coalitions and state leaders.
Learn more about the HOPE Consortium at https://www.projecthopelaunch.com/.
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Evaluation Partners
In an effort to document best practices, lessons learned, and the impact of the NOW Learning Community and Project HOPE, we are working closely with four key evaluation partners who bring in rich expertise and experience around systems building research and evaluation. Learn more about our partners:
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Michigan State University, Department of Psychology - Dr. Pennie Foster-Fishman
