The woman who led the early childhood initiatives for the New York City Department of Education now works in Tulsa.
Sophia Pappas’ work in New York gained the appreciation of local billionaire and philanthropist George Kaiser.
So he, and the George Kaiser Family Foundation, hired her. And now Pappas has the task of implementing the foundation’s Birth through Eight Strategy — a new decade-long plan Kaiser thinks will be a major part of the foundation’s legacy.
The program’s first phase is underway, and over the next two years it hopes to reach 17,000 children living at or near the poverty level in Tulsa. Pappas, Kaiser and foundation Executive Director Ken Levit explained the program and its intent in detail to the World during an interview Wednesday.
The strategy is a compilation of more than a decade’s worth of data and lessons learned from the GKFF’s attempts to break the cycle of poverty in Tulsa — a cause to which Kaiser has dedicated virtually all of his fortune.
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It has four goals — having healthier low-income births, having more nurturing homes, making sure low-income children are ready for kindergarten and achieving academic success by third grade.
“What we learned in the last several years, which should’ve been totally obvious to us before, is … we were tending to ignore the most obvious delivery channel of the way to assist a newborn in the first few years of life, … which is delivering the message through the primary teacher of that child — parents,” Kaiser said.
The program isn’t simple. It is attempting to reach more low-income Tulsa families and provide more, or better access to, social services over the early years of a child’s life — starting before birth through age 8. It is also very much a work in progress.
Pappas explained that the first phase will act as a trial period for the foundation and its community partners — the whole strategy will be rolled out with a particular focus on the early parts of a child’s life.
“Rather than start with the whole continuum, we are focusing on prenatal and the first few months of the child’s life,” Pappas said. “We will build on lessons learned from those targeted efforts in order to refine processes and expand navigation (of social services) through the later stages of early childhood development.”
A person’s participation in any part of the Birth through Eight Strategy — or BEST — will be voluntary, Kaiser said.
Supporting the child’s development will begin before birth, when a Tulsa City-County Health Department-employed family advocate will reach out to an expectant mother registered with Soonercare, Kaiser and Pappas said.
That family advocate will help a person find and get access to prenatal care with the intent of having the baby born healthier — increasing the rate of healthy births, Pappas said.
Once a child is born, the mother or family will be visited in the hospital by another family advocate who will talk about how to support the child’s brain development and certain nurturing strategies, such as how to calm a crying baby. That component of the strategy is already underway across Tulsa.
After birth, family advocates will support parents and caregivers, teaching them strategies that support the child’s development and connecting them with services — through home visits, phone calls or during visits to the doctor.
“There’s a whole series of family advocates that hand off from one to the other for that continuum of nine years or so,” Kaiser said.
Pappas said BEST will be in collaboration with Tulsa Public Schools, the Tulsa City-County Health Department, local health care providers and dozens of other social service groups in hopes of weaving together what can be a maze of services for low-income residents.
The foundation and its community partners are still discussing how to implement the strategy in certain areas.
The plan also comes with a hefty financial commitment from GKFF and others: $100 million.
GKFF has secured about $15 million in funding from a national group of philanthropies, Blue Meridian Partners, which the foundation will match.
Pappas said supporting its community partners, expanding and implementing programs will cost the foundation about $75 million more.
There is a chance the public will become involved, too. Levit said the foundation could seek public funding to help expand the strategy in the future.
