Education Foundation of Collier County

Connect Now is the community engagement initiative of The Education Foundation of Collier County that came about early in 2008 in an effort to bring our community together to improve public education and community life.

The initial stage of Connect Now was to oversee a process that listened to and elicited a clear Statement from the community—a larger collective voice articulating shared goals for the community and its schools. The hope was that the process, if carried out successfully, would produce a statement which the hundreds of conversation participants from all over the county would take ownership. That has happened. Click here to read the Connect Now Community Statement (Spanish or Creole).

The natural result of the process is that those who participated now feel more involved and committed to seeing improvement and changes in the schools and the community. The Education Foundation of Collier County and all who have been involved are determined to do all that they can to ensure that Connect Now leads to new activities, new strategies, more people involved and most importantly, schools and the community working together in new ways.

One of the indicators of success is that the School Board and district leadership would seize the opportunity for leadership and decision-making within the context of the collective community voice to support education. The School Board and district leadership has been very responsive to Connect Now and decided to align their strategic planning within the framework of Connect Now. They formalized that commitment in a unanimous resolution on April 16, 2009.

In Fall 2009, the District School Board of Collier County launched a long-range strategic planning and community engagement process to guide district work for the next two to three years. The process will result in a vision with clear goals for the Collier County Schools and the associated operational plans to implement this vision. It is designed to give district staff and community members multiple opportunities to provide meaningful input.

The Education Foundation continues to provide the capacity to provide a structure for ongoing engagement within Connect Now. Year One brings a particular focus on sharing the Community Statement and the engagement work with the community-at-large to build strategic collaborative partnerships and to create opportunities to learn. The Foundation is also exploring an interactive platform through which to connect and serve our community. In addition, The Education Foundation is strengthening its existing work with teachers and principals to help build capacity for engagement at the school level.

The next step for all of us—organizations, business leaders, community members, parents, the school district, individual schools, teachers, principals, students—is to read the Community Statement and identify our own ways to connect around common aspirations for our schools. We all have a role to play in educating our community’s children—Get Involved!