Most Head-Start agencies struggle year after year to meet their non-federal match. This happens due to the lack of technologies that helps them keep a correct track of how much is actually collected without incurring in extra costs.
Agencies face multiple challenges when collecting their in-kind donations, but the ones that are harder to overcome are:
Additionally, with the arrival of online classes due to the COVID-19 scenario, many agencies that relied mainly on volunteer In-Kind weren’t able to fulfill their 20% non-federal match. Given the fact that family engagement and participation hit rock bottom for obvious reasons, Agencies had to request a waiver of their 20% non-federal match to not lose their funding, and another main challenge arose:
Follow along and discover how our PDSA Framework for In-kind donations helped Agency B to meet their non-federal match, and how it can help your Agency achieving the same results.
If you aren’t familiar with the “Plan, Do, Study, Act Framework” we recommend you reading our explanatory post that you can find here. We also have an infographic that might help you better understand this process, find it here.
As you might have already read in our introductory post, The PDSA framework is an ongoing practice to improve any problem or internal work process in Head Start Agencies. Here we are going to cover each of the four steps that led Agency B to success.
In this stage, you agree with your team on the changes that will be tested and plan your actions to make them happen. Agency B identified the following changes and objectives that would make them improve their In-Kind collection.
1. Family Service staff to focus on achieving 100% family enrollment by December.
2. Use surveys to identify any possible issues with In-Kind collection before and after PDSA cycle is complete.
3. Monthly calendars to be created on Oct-Dec for site directors to follow-up.
4. Meetings to be set up for team levels to evaluate result.
Once Agency B identified the main areas that needed improvement, it was time to identify the actions that will help this change in the next stage of the cycle.
1. Low family onboarding.
2. Not many in-kind being submitted.
3. Value generated for that month is well below the amount needed to meet non-federal share match.
In this stage is time to apply the interventions needed to change the previous scenario. Agency B established the following actions in order to start making changes on their In-Kind problems:
1. Family Service staff to enroll families during enrollment intake, back to school night, and home visits.
2. Staff needs to assign activities, communicate with parents, send reminders and approve.
3. Site directors to set meetings on 3rd Friday of the month and submit reports to Agency Directors.
Monitor the results for a period of time. Collecting data is important in this step, so make sure you are documenting everything, as this data will be used in the next step of the cycle.
1. Tutorials sent to all families to ensure they are knowledgeable about submitting In-Kind activities.
2. Send surveys to families asking why they don’t submit In-Kind and how to help.
At this stage you will now need to study the data you have collected, which will be based on the results agreed at the planning stage.
1. Check onboarding reports to see if onboarding quota has improved.
2. Staff look at the data from classroom, site, and agency level on a monthly basis, so they can ensure to hit the monthly goal.
3. Review reports submitted.
Agency B must agree on what needs to be adjusted or dropped in order to obtain positive results by moving forward.
1. Hold a monthly meeting to review how the plan and do stage have been going.
At their monthly meeting, they were thrilled to see both Family Onboarding and In-Kind donations had been steadily increasing, a good sign that the PDSA cycle implementation was working.
For Agency B the act stage consisted in:
1. After reviewing the results from goals set at the monthly meeting, they identified that fatherhood engagement is still quite low
2. They re-group and brainstorm how they can tackle this.
3. The process starts all over again!
When the Learning Genie was introduced to me, I was very excited about sharing with the parents what I was teaching to the children on a more personable level. One of the most valuable features that I used was taking photos of the children doing activities and being able to send the pictures electronically to the parents on a daily basis. The parents were very excited each day to receive their email and see what their child had learned. The parents would use information we provided on a daily basis and talk about what they learned at school. This was a great conversation starter. Most children would come home from school and ask their child what they learned at school today and most would say “nothing I just played”. With the daily information I found that the children showed what they learned at school sometimes teaching their parents some things.