$4.5 Million Kellogg Grants to Duke, NCCU To Benefit Low-income Children in Durham

North Carolina Central University (NCCU), a historically black public institution, and Duke University, a private research university, are joining together in a unique collaboration to assist low-income children in their home city of Durham, through $4.5 million in grants awarded by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.

NCCU will use $2.25 million to expand its successful Saturday Academy for low-performing Durham school children and to create family resource centers for students and their families. The grant is the largest NCCU has ever received from a private source.

Duke University will also receive $2.25 million, to develop intensive after-school programs at community centers in low-income neighborhoods with which Duke has been partnering near its campus. The grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation is the largest Duke has received for community engagement for the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership.

"The power of a partnership between these two flagship institutions on behalf of youth and families in Durham can only improve the conditions in these communities," said Tyrone Baines, Kellogg Foundation program director. "I think it can become a national model."

Prior to this four-year grant, each university had independently established relationships to create lasting, significant change in the areas immediately surrounding their campuses--NCCU through its Eagle Village project and Duke with the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership. Officials say the complementary grants will strengthen and expand those community engagement efforts and encourage the sharing of successful strategies through a grant governance board with representatives from both universities and the involved communities.

"I applaud the Kellogg Foundation for this vote of confidence in our effort to empower youth in our community," said NCCU Chancellor James H. Ammons. "NCCU has had a long tradition of training scholars to use the knowledge they acquire and apply it in the local community -- that remains our goal. As chancellor, I am an avid supporter of the University's engagement in the community."

North Carolina Central University's Community Access To Resource Enterprises (CARE)

NCCU's Community Access to Resource Enterprises (CARE) has five components and will support six existing programs at NCCU. The five components include:

• Family Resource Center -- Four service centers will be created to serve the residents of Eagle Village. The centers will be located at the John Avery Boys and Girls Club, the Salvation Army Boys and Girls Clubs, W.D. Hill Recreation Center and McDougald Terrace.

• Exchange with Duke University -- Each institution has its own service area, but will work together to train facilitators and family resource center coordinators. Duke will assign some of its students to internships at the community resource access sites and to support the Saturday Academy. Duke and NCCU representatives will meet with community support agencies involved in youth service delivery to discuss the NCCU/Duke collaboration and progress of youth participants. The mental health offerings provided by The Duke Endowment will also be a part of the collaborative effort. NCCU will also help to evaluate the progress of Duke's Holistic Opportunity for Enrichment program.

• Campus/Community Engagement -- By providing release time for faculty, they will be able to support Project CARE and reinforce the impact of scholarship and service on effective teaching and learning.

• Engagement of Latino Population -- A Spanish-speaking individual will be assigned to the respective family resource access centers to assist in providing services to the Hispanic population as well as in the Saturday Academy. NCCU also plans to form a partnership with the Durham Self-Help agency that already has a strong relationship with the Latino population and to host "Forums of Discovery" to discuss the needs of the Latino community and how collaborative initiative can be developed.

• Engagement of Traditional/Non-traditional Pathways Students -- Under this component viable career options will be presented to students.

The existing programs that will be supported by the grants are Saturday Academy, Home Ownership Institute, Entrepreneurs Alive, Technology Opportunities Program-Community Access to Technology and Tutoring at a Distance Program.

• Saturday Academy is an intensive academic enrichment program for grades 3-6 that occurs during the school year and is targeted at local students who are not performing on grade level as indicated by their end-of-the-grade tests.

• Home Ownership Institute provides training in three areas -- the process of buying a home, money management and individual growth and self-esteem. Although the program targets adults, it involves youth training in planning for future home ownership.

• Entrepreneurs Alive is a collaborative effort with the NCCU School of Business and Hillside High School in Durham that provides an 8-week session of instruction in basic business skills, whereby high school students learn to operate a specific business in the community.

• Technology Opportunities Program -- Community Access to Technology program is a collaboration with Red Hat Inc. that is making computer technology available to the residents of Eagle Village.

• Tutoring at a Distance Program is a collaboration with General Electric/Elfun Corporation, and is designed to expose children to utilizing computer technology in order to assist in narrowing the digital divide and to provide tutoring services to children needing additional academic assistance.

• Academic Community Service Learning Program requires full-time, transfer and readmit undergraduate students to complete 15 clock hours per semester of community service.

Duke University's Holistic Opportunity Plan For Enrichment (HOPE)

Academic support and enrichment activities will be the main focus of Duke's Holistic Opportunity Plan for Enrichment. HOPE will operate on a case management model, supporting teams of school personnel, Duke student tutors and community service providers. The teams will assess the academic, health and other personal needs of each of the 160 students enrolled in after-school programs at six partner community centers in the Crest Street, West End and Walltown neighborhoods. Community centers working with the program will provide enhanced academic and other opportunities for neighborhood children, with support from students, faculty and other members of the Duke community, as well as other partners from the Durham community.

Duke's Office of Community Affairs will coordinate HOPE, which was developed in collaboration with the Durham Public Schools, the Durham County Department of Social Services, Durham County Cooperative Extension, City of Durham Parks and Recreation, community center leaders and local faith communities. Officials say that HOPE's goals are to improve students' academic achievement in reading, writing and mathematics; to increase attendance at school; to reduce discipline referrals and suspensions; and to improve students' self-esteem and attitudes toward school. In addition, HOPE will encourage parents and other family members to become more involved in their students' education and to take advantage themselves of available educational services offered by the neighborhood community centers.

Like NCCU, Duke will work closely with existing Durham organizations. It will offer the HOPE program with six community centers that serve K-12 youth at these locations: St. James Family Life Center, St. John Baptist Church and Northside Baptist Church in Walltown; the West End Community Center, the Juanita McNeil and Joseph Alston West End Teen Center and Calvary Ministries in the West End; and the W.I. Patterson Recreation Center in the Crest Street neighborhood. Calvary Ministries' Community Family Life and Recreation Center at Lyon Park will be the site of a health clinic staffed by personnel from Duke's Department of Community and Family Medicine and School of Nursing as part of the HOPE program, and will also provide targeted medical services for community residents. The Walltown and West End neighborhoods, adjacent to Duke's campus, are two of the three largest low-income neighborhoods in Durham. They are also among the 12 neighborhoods in the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership, which seeks to improve the quality of life of neighborhood residents and boost students' academic achievement in the seven public schools that serve those neighborhoods. Neighborhood Partnership programs, in which Duke and the neighborhood groups are partnering, include extensive affordable housing initiatives, youth programs, job development and educational initiatives.

Duke University President Nannerl O. Keohane said, "The lesson that we continue to learn from our collaborative community engagement activities is that working together is the most powerful way to improve the quality of life in neighborhoods facing serious problems."

Keohane praised Michael Palmer, director of Duke's Office of Community Affairs, who originally conceived the idea of the holistic approach to children's needs.

"The more we strategize and work with our neighbors on the problems they consider most important, the better the results will be," she said. "Our neighborhood partners have made clear that their highest priority is to develop programs to support young people, so that's where we're focusing our neighborhood engagement efforts."

"The HOPE program really is a community-driven program that will bring the resources of service providers from many sources together to help these young people succeed academically and personally," Keohane said. "We expect that large numbers of Duke students will be involved in these efforts. We also are very excited about this project and the opportunity to work with our colleagues at NCCU to ensure that we coordinate our efforts, learn best practices and implement necessary changes to benefit our community. We are extremely grateful to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation for its visionary leadership and support for these collaborations and our community engagement strategies."

Community Leaders Respond

Both universities will also work closely with the school system, supporting the strategies of Durham Public Schools Superintendent Ann Denlinger to ensure that all Durham children perform at grade level. Denlinger said the new efforts will dovetail with the schools' mission to "leave no children behind."

"We are determined that all children in the Durham's school system achieve their academic potential," Denlinger said. "We have ambitious goals and we know we cannot achieve them without support from the entire community. This marvelous grant from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation and the concentrated efforts of our two premier universities will enhance the schools' and our community's efforts to help our young people achieve. Both CARE and HOPE represent exciting opportunities for our community's children, and we in Durham Public Schools are absolutely delighted by the news of this very generous grant."

Durham Mayor William Bell praised the Kellogg grant and the collaboration between Durham's universities. "This is a major step forward for Durham's children," Bell said. "A core group of committed residents in Durham neighborhoods has been working to find ways to break the cycle of poverty and improve educational and economic outcomes for our children at neighborhood community centers. This unprecedented partnership between two leading institutions of higher education - one public, one private - with city and county government, the public schools and other service providers, will help provide needed resources to support and reinforce the important work going on in community centers across Durham. Partnerships such as these directed at important community needs are one reason why I feel so optimistic about Durham's future."

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation was established in 1930 "to help people help themselves through the practical application of knowledge and resources to improve their quality of life and that of future generations." Its programming activities center around the common vision of a world in which each person has a sense of worth; accepts responsibility for self, family, community and societal well-being; and has the capacity to be productive, and to help create nurturing families, responsive institutions and healthy communities.

To achieve the greatest impact, the Foundation targets its grants toward specific areas. These include: health, food systems and rural development; youth and education; and philanthropy and volunteerism. Within these areas, attention is given to the cross-cutting themes of leadership; information and communication technology; capitalizing on diversity; and social and economic community development. Grants are concentrated in the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the southern African countries of Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbawe.