Chattanooga: Social Innovation and an Education Conversation Shift

SHIFT Chattanooga

Build community will to improve public education.

Shift is an awareness campaign emphasizing the importance of strong school systems in Chattanooga and beyond. It begins with a series of public ads containing local education data, a promotional website, and tools to foster a deeper level of civic engagement in the sociopolitical issues surrounding public education. The mission of Shift is to drive continuous improvement of public schools with the support of local citizens.

CreateHere is…

CreateHere is a Chattanooga, TN nonprofit; a group of residents and new recruits working for arts, economic, and cultural development in the urban core. We put creative processes to work and connect locals around pressing issues, including safety, education, jobs, and talent retention. Our projects include a leadership development fellowship, a small business planning course, a grants program for creatives, and Stand, the world’s largest community visioning effort.

What inspires our work? A belief that place-making and connectivity are the source of innovation. Chattanooga is full of people with ideas, passions, and skills bigger and more diverse than our own. We work to connect, to support, and to build.

_______________________________SHIFT Chattanooga: Investing in Public EducationFriday, November 11, 2011

“My one wish for education is that we all work together for the children…that the whole community begins to invest in the school system,” said Hollie Steele a 4th grade teacher at Ooltewah Elementary School in a recent SHIFT Chattanooga Conversation.

“When you see communities where every kid is waiting till graduation to leave, I can tell you the future of that community,” said Pete Cooper, President of theCommunity Foundation of Greater Chattanooga. This is not our community, he goes on to say. We’ve begun to understand that our greatest strength is understanding our individual assets and asserting them in targeted and deliberate projects. We can see this tangibly in the structures that we celebrate Chattanooga with every day.

SHIFT CONVERSATIONS Rachel Gammon from ShiftCha on Vimeo.

When we discuss education, and the inequities between some schools over others, it is more imperative than ever for our community to explore our individual resources, and how we can engage ourselves in public education. “I think that my one wish for education would be that every child enters school being valued and every child has the ability to reach all of their dreams and that there’s not a disparity between the education someone is getting in one part of town and the education someone is getting in another part of town,” said Rachel Gammon, Executive Director of the Neighborhood House.

This can become difficult when we are transfixed with debates over education reform, like school vouchers or teacher evaluations. We can become distanced, feeling like we are unable to participate in substantial support for public education because we aren’t the ones responsible for decisions concerning public education. And this is not true. We can support our children through giving teachers the resources to provide quality education, such as donating time to read and mentor children or giving school supplies to classrooms or telling teachers how much we appreciate what they do for our community.

Regardless of whatever occurs with the Equal Opportunity Scholarship Act, currently being debated in Nashville, public education will still exist in Hamilton County, and it is up to us to ensure that every child in Hamilton County receives a strong education—because it will impact the future of our community.

As Pete Cooper, President of the Community Foundation of Greater Chattanooga said, “Every body feels like this is a community where they own it, they have a stake in it, and it’s their community. This isn’t some place where they’re living, waiting to go somewhere else.” And that’s what makes Chattanooga special.

http://createhere.org/blog/shift_chattanooga_investing_in_public_education/