Dream Project Attends the Education Results Network Meeting

By Karl Gapuz, Community Partnerships Co-lead

The quarterly Education Results Network (ERN) meeting was held this February, just before Valentine’s Day. ERN meetings give different players in the Road Map Project region the chance to convene and re-solidify goals as one unit. While these meetings are always useful, this ERN meeting was particularly exciting for a few reasons.

For one, Ana Mari Cauce, the recently appointed University of Washington president, was the guest keynote speaker at this event. President Cauce gave a powerful speech detailing her own struggle with education as an immigrant to the United States and highlighting the clear educational inequities that still exist in our region. “The road to justice and opportunity is long; it’s difficult. But with this project, we know our destination and we have a map,” she stated. President Cauce also mentioned how the University of Washington is playing a role in mitigating opportunity gaps within our region and acknowledged Dream Project’s impact in helping students attain higher education.

Second, the highly anticipated release of the new 2015 Road Map Results report was made available to all stakeholders in the Road Map Project region. This report outlines data regarding our collective progress guiding children from early childhood through postsecondary degree/career credential. Dream Project was able to play a crucial role in the day’s events as leaders served as table facilitators to hold conversations about the data presented and used information from the region’s new Indicator Dashboard tool to analyze trends of success over time.

All in all, we as an organization love coming to these events, as they provide us with an opportunity to contextualize our work within the region and network with community-based organizations, key policy makers and district administrators to share best practices and continue to strengthen our work within our schools.