Resources for Afterschool Professionals

Introduce young people in programs to healthy eating habits with easy recipes and activities compiled from afterschool programs in New York City. To ensure that snack time is easy, filling, educational, and fun, this cookbook includes easy to prepare recipes that require no cooking or special training and that can be done in regular program space.

The guide outlines a twelve-week course of study. It is designed for middle school programs that are looking to expand their learning impact in communities using the arts as a tool. The CPY Program is designed to tie three key elements together each day: Artistic Knowledge, Academic Knowledge, and Personal Knowledge.

This guide was created to help community-based organizations (CBOs) and cultural institutions create a quality training program for teaching artists who are placed in afterschool programs. The Guide is designed to be useful to all site directors or other program managers who are responsible for training teaching artists. This Guide provides a framework for developing a Teaching Artist Professional Development Institute that infuses youth development with program practice while supporting the practitioners’ skills, knowledge, and expertise.

This paper seeks to address what is a framework for approaching quality out-of-school time programming.

The Food Resource and Action Center (FRAC) introduces its new Afterschool Meals Guide, an online resource to ensure that more afterschool programs are able to receive federal funding to provide healthy meals to children when the school day ends. Intended for afterschool programs, sponsors, state agencies, anti-hunger advocates and anyone interested in making nutritious meals available to children who need them, the guide walks through the basics of the Afterschool Meal Program, offers tips on how to apply for funding, and shares strategies on how to make it a success.

This NYSAN publication provides an overview of the types of professional development available in the out-of-school time field; outcomes participants or organizations can expect related to each type of professional development opportunity; principles of effective professional development for trainers, managers, and front-line staff; and considerations individuals and/or organizations must make when deciding on deploying resources for professional development.

The growing interest in program quality has brought an increase of tools available to help programs and systems assess and improve quality. Given the size and diversity of the youth-serving sector, it is unrealistic to expect that any one quality assessment tool will fit all programs or circumstances. While diversity in available resources is positive and reflects the evolution of the field, it also makes it important that potential users have access to good information to help guide their decision-making.

and , with Sean Fischer and Marybeth Shinn, The Forum for Youth Investment

This self-assessment tool provides an opportunity for program leaders and key staffs, in collaboration with other stakeholders, to utilize a common set of standards to assess, plan, design and execute strategies for on going program improvement.

Applied during the planning phase of The Wallace Foundation’s Parents and Communities for Kids (PACK) initiative, the Theory of Change (TOC) approach was designed to highlight lessons that will be of most interest to program planners, evaluators, and funders who are interested in applying this method to their work.

Examining high-performing afterschool projects funded by The After-School Corporation (TASC), evaluators reanalyzed student performance data collected during the multi-year evaluation of the TASC initiative to identify projects where the TASC afterschool program was especially likely to have contributed to improvements in students’ academic achievement. Report includes the Out of School Time (OST) Observation Instrument.