“By truly listening to one another, we were able to focus on the areas of education where we can have the most influence,” says Florencia Velasco Fortner about her experience serving on the Education Collaborative Team. This group of community experts was one of three panels brought together by United Way to create ten-year goals for Dallas, Collin, Rockwall and southern Denton counties in the areas of Education, Income and Health.
Velasco Fortner is president and chief executive officer of The Concilio, which focuses in the areas of Health and Education. In particular, The Concilio demonstrates the incredible impact that parental involvement can have in helping children to succeed in school and eventually graduate from high school. Velasco Fortner has more than 15 years of nonprofit experience and has been with The Concilio since 2005.
What was unique about the Education Collaborative Team, she says, was that the experts “started with spirited discussions about what we each felt” about their specific areas of expertise—early childhood, parent involvement, primary and secondary public schools, higher education and so on—but then “stepped out of our expertise to look at how we can make the biggest difference in transforming lives. We all asked ourselves, ‘Why are we in this business?’ The answer is because we want to educate our children. The ultimate goal is further education.”
So when it came time to set a “big, bold goal” for the next ten years, Velasco Fortner says the Education Collaborative Team focused on that shared purpose: preparing children to succeed in education after high school.
What will it take to make transformative improvements in Education in our community? Velasco Fortner says, “United Way is in a position to influence individuals and organizations who can join forces and turn families in our community around. But preparing students to succeed cannot be just a United Way goal—it has to become a community goal.”
Velasco Fortner praises United Way for the way it brought the experts in Education, Income and Health together to create the ten-year United 2020 community goals. “I was initially curious about how open United Way would be to our input,” she says. “But the whole process was amazing. It was a strong, transparent effort to include input from real stakeholders throughout our community.”
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