Over a hundred business leaders, legislators, and executives from youth serving organizations came together on January 23rd for the first Georgia Afterschool Business Breakfast entitled Afterschool’s Impact: Business Leadership and Ways to Connect the Two for a Bigger Bottom Line.

Ann Cramer, director of North America, IBM Corporate Community Relations and Donna Klein, CEO of Corporate Voices for Working Families spoke on the important role businesses play in supporting Georgia’s afterschool and summer programs. Examples of businesses taking the afterschool learning issue seriously were highlighted, such as the IBM Work/Life program which helps employees better manage their work and personal lives by creating a flexible work environment which is sensitive to an individual’s needs and responsibilities. At the same time, it was emphasized that there is still a great need for more companies to support high-quality afterschool programs for young people through the creation of innovative initiatives.

Afterschool programs in Milledgeville, Georgia are banding together to look at issues of common concern, to talk about best practices, to write grants together, and to provide professional development training. Last August 35 afterschool programs began meeting monthly in Milledgeville, GA. With an overarching goal of strengthening the afterschool community, the group has already successfully launched its first community-wide Lights On event where we were able to showcase what is happening in each program and get to know who the providers are in the rural, central Georgia community.

Since then the group has participated in a grant workshop and has begun a slate of free professional development programming delivered over nine Saturdays. Topics included in these sessions are: Math Instruction that Works; What Is A Learning Style and Why Do I Need to Know It; The Characteristics of an Effective Afterschool Program; and How to Get Free or Inexpensive Educational Materials.

The group has future plans to provide workshops on how to strengthen outreach and involvement with parents and how to how to build effective boards. For more information on this exciting collaboration, please contact Linda Watson Kaufman at (478) 445-0145.

The Center for Summer Learning’s National Conference will be April 19-20, 2007 in Atlanta, GA. Bringing together school administrators, program providers, policy makers and researchers, this is the only national conference that brings the issue of summer learning to the forefront. We highly encourage you to attend this year!

A number of engaging sessions will be led by Georgia experts from the education and youth development fields. Topics to be covered by Georgia leaders include: Integrating Parent Involvement into Summer Learning for Successful Child and Youth Development; Summer Extravaganza Teaching and Learning Camp; Summer Learning and Workforce Development: Effectively Reaching our Older Youth; and Time and Learning Opportunities in the 21st Century.

VOX Teen Communications announces an exciting new project: an online Teen Resource Guide about health services in the metro Atlanta area. VOX teens are contacting metro-area agencies and organizations to get information that would be important to teens in need of services and are posting the information in a searchable database available on the web.