Commentary:Charitable Giving: 'World of Possibilities' tells public

Daily Record, The (Baltimore), Aug 22, 2008 by Betsy Nelson

Helping young children from economically disadvantaged homes catch up with their peers in language and vocabulary development is very difficult, but critical in heading off first-grade failure and promoting long-term success.

When the Zanvyl & Isabelle Krieger Fund and the Lockhart Vaughan Foundation learned that researchers at the Johns Hopkins University had developed teacher training strategies that were helping to bridge this gap, they quickly and generously lent their support.

Their funding helped the Johns Hopkins University Early Learning Project pay for coaches to work intensively with Head Start teachers. The training illustrated new strategies to build language and vocabulary development in economically disadvantaged preschoolers. An evaluation of the program showed Head Start children whose teachers used these methods performed significantly better than those in a control group.

This success story was recently featured on "A World of Possibilities," an award-winning, hour-long weekly radio program that aims to "penetrate behind the headlines to uncover the deeper meanings of events." The series offers in-depth analysis, informed commentary and an exploration of new approaches to the most- challenging problems, with the goal of opening minds and inspiring new possibilities.

Participants on the "Teach Your Children Well: Reforming Education in Schools and Society" segment discussed the power of education to transform our world, acknowledging that all too often we fail to prepare our children adequately for life's challenges.

Four stories illustrated successful initiatives to transform patterns of dysfunction, from public health campaigns to community building through digital media, from early literacy programs to efforts to repair a broken school system.

Karen Kreisberg of the Zanvyl & Isabelle Krieger Fund and Pete Powell of the Lockhart Vaughan Foundation told how the Hopkins Early Learning Project attracted significant public funds to expand its effort.

"It used to be that if foundations could help demonstrate that an initiative was worthwhile, the government would pick it up and fund it, but that has changed over the years," said Powell. "This effort demonstrates that a good pilot project can still attract government funding, even in these days of reduced government funding for social programs."

In the case of early literacy, the stakes are particularly high, Powell added. "If kids are not ready to learn to read when they get to the first grade, they're likely to be failures in school."

"A World of Possibilities" is sponsored by the Mainstream Media Project, a nonprofit public education and strategic communications organization that uses broadcast media to raise public awareness about new approaches to longstanding issues.

The project prides itself on the fact that at a fraction of the cost of paid media, it has been reaching millions of listeners at once, not for sound bites but for sustained, interactive conversations about major environmental, security, economic and social issues. And it has done so not only in the polite precincts of public radio but also in the boisterous marketplace of commercial mass media.

The project has proven especially useful to foundations, nonprofit organizations and citizen coalitions interested in raising the level of public awareness of their initiatives. The goal of these programs is to inform broader audiences effectively about the vitally important but little-known work of nongovernmental organizations and individuals.

To hear "Teach Your Children Well: Reforming Education in Schools and Society," visit http://www.aworldofpossibilities.com/ details.cfm?id=337; the program may also be downloaded as a podcast.

(Betsy Nelson, executive director of the Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers, writes every other week for The Daily Record. She can be reached at 410-727-1205 or bnelson@abagmd.org.)