Nashville After Zone Alliance

During Spring 2010, the Nashville After Zone Alliance (NAZA) piloted a data-driven quality improvement system with a cohort of afterschool programs in the Northeast Zone, a geographic area encompassing the Maplewood and Stratford clusters. The quality improvement pilot included six Anchor Partners (Martha O’Bryan, STARS, Village CDC, YCAP, YLLC, and YMCA) and served 250 middle school aged youth at 3 school  and 4 community based out-of-school-time (OST) sites.

NAZA partnered with the David P. Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality at the Forum for Youth Investment to support implementation of the initiative. This work was part of the Ready by 21© Quality Counts initiative, a multi site project supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and Atlantic Philanthropies.

High quality afterschool programs can support goals for positive development from childhood into the early adult years, helping communities and schools to assure that youth emerge from adolescence ready for college, work and life.

The NAZA quality improvement pilot was designed to replicate an experimentally validated intervention designed to improve the effectiveness of afterschool services by:

a) Building management skills related to continuous quality improvement

b) Building staff skills to deliver high quality relationships and instruction to all children and youth that attend afterschool settings

c) Improving youth learning and development