Jodut Hashmi

Children spend 75% of their waking hours outside of the classroom, yet our nation does shockingly little to capture educational value from this time for low-income kids. Our program coaches educators and family members to help kids learn to read on grade level by 4th grade. Springboard Collaborative envisions a world where all children have the requisite literacy skills to access life opportunities. Nationally, we are the only organization to have cracked the code on equipping marginalized families to teach reading at home. At Springboard Collaborative, family-educator collaboration is the most joyful, culturally affirming, and cost-effective way to give kids access to high-quality instructional time. Our recipe for impact is a method called Family-Educator Learning Accelerators (or FELAs). FELAs are 5-to-10-week cycles during which families and educators team up to help kids reach learning goals. When educators and families collaborate, the results are extraordinary. In districts that struggle to get 20% of parents to attend report card conferences, Springboard Collaborative’s weekly family workshops average 88% attendance. For every hour that a teacher leads a workshop, parents deliver 25 hours of tutoring at home. As a result, students average 4-5 months of reading gain during each program cycle, closing the gap to grade level by half in just five or ten weeks.