For Communities
An innovative framework for transformative change in early childhood education
Community Parenting Support Saturation (CPSS) serves as a framework dedicated to enhancing local community systems, strategies, and interventions that support parents in raising their children. This framework aims to:
As the lead organization for CPSS, Illinois Action for Children (IAFC) partners with early childhood providers and collaborations in select communities and provides them with technical assistance and coaching to achieve their goals and vision of saturation.
We provide communities with the resources and expertise in community systems development to enhance their ability in uplifting and empowering families in their community to support their child’s growth and learning.
Since 2020, IAFC has supported three communities—Rockford, Aurora, and Chicago’s North Lawndale neighborhood—with funding, training, data analysis, and strategic direction as they pilot the Community Parenting Support Saturation (CPSS) framework over an initial three-year period.
Through the CPSS framework, parents of young children (ages birth to 5) are offered interventions that address parenting needs in three levels of support to address kindergarten readiness.
SPARK (Strong, Prepared and Ready for Kindergarten) is a Fox Valley United Way education initiative connecting underserved families in Aurora with early education and childcare opportunities that prepare their young children for success..
Alignment Rockford is a collaboration of organizations and businesses committed to supporting and uplifting the experience of raising young children.
Carole Robertson Center for Learning is an organization dedicated to educating, enriching, and empowering children and families through comprehensive child and family development programs.
The program emerged from conversations held by a small group of philanthropic partners that were interested in how to engage primary caregivers to increase the number of children ready for kindergarten in 2017. The following year, this group engaged with Start Early, Logan Square Neighborhood Association, and Family Focus to conduct a series of focus groups with families to understand and develop the Community Parenting Support Saturation vision. IAFC was selected as the Lead Anchor organization in 2019. In 2020, IAFC launched an RFP and selected three communities – Aurora, Rockford, and the North Lawndale neighborhood in Chicago – to pilot the framework.
The Community Parenting Support Saturation Program is generously funded by our philanthropic partners: Crown Family Philanthropies, CME Group, Dunham Foundation, J.B. and M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation, Illinois Children’s Healthcare Foundation, Irving Harris Foundation, Robert R. McCormick Foundation, Steans Family Foundation, Vivo Foundation, and the John and Kathleen Schreiber Foundation.
You can support Illinois’s littlest learners. Become a funding partner and help sustain our efforts in Illinois!
Director of the Community Parenting Support Saturation Program
alexander.bui@actforchildren.org
