After School Matters Looks to the Future with Strategic Plan | After School Matters

David Sinski
Executive Director, After School Matters

We are incredibly proud of the tremendous impact After School Matters has had over the past two decades. What began as an ingenious project conceived by Chicago First Lady Maggie Daley and Chicago Cultural Affairs Commissioner Lois Weisberg has gained many supporters, partners, program providers, and champions. Together, we have grown from our first summer in 1991 when we delivered arts programs at Block 37 and evolved into After School Matters, the largest out-of-school-time program serving high school students in the nation, offering 20,000 program opportunities this year, and a model for teen programming.

Thoughtful, ongoing strategic planning and continuous improvement are essential to any strong and ambitious organization. That is why, throughout the past year, After School Matters has worked closely with the Civic Consulting Alliance, Boston Consulting Group and Deloitte to strategize how we can continue to improve our organization, align resources, enhance teen academic outcomes and more effectively reach those teens who will benefit most from our programs.

Strategic Plan Overview

With the guidance of our Board members, staff and consultants, we emerged from this strategic planning process with five key directions that will guide After School Matters in the coming years:

1. First and foremost, After School Matters delivers programs that inspire and motivate teens to embrace and develop their talents, and find their future. After School Matters will be intentional about articulating a core purpose of our programs. That is, to develop teens’ job readiness skills and positively impact their academic and post-secondary outcomes.  We are helping students gain skills and experiences that will help them find their future – in college and in their careers.
2. Research indicates that teens demonstrate more positive outcomes when they stay in After School Matters programs for multiple cycles. For this reason, we will prioritize retention of teens versus simply filling program slots. This allows us to develop strong relationships with teens and support their personal growth and development in an intentional and meaningful way.
3. Our limited resources will be targeted towards serving Chicago teens who will benefit the most from After School Matters – primarily Chicago Public Schools (CPS) high school students. While this has always been a core population served by After School Matters, we are now striving to ensure that at least 90 percent of all program slots are targeted to these teens. Other out-of-school resources currently exist elsewhere to support the out-of-school-time needs of teenagers from private institutions and those who fall outside of the high school age range.
4. After School Matters will re-evaluate where we locate programs to improve focus and efficiency. We will strive to ensure that programs are accessible to our core population of CPS high school students, while maximizing limited staff and financial resources. This deliberate approach will increase our organizational efficiency and allow us to devote more time to collaborating with, and providing support to, our program partners and providers.  
5. As we strive to maximize the impact of every program opportunity, After School Matters will phase out club programs. Data has indicated that teens enrolled in drop-in club programs significantly underperform in skills development as compared to their peers in our apprenticeship and internship programs. Clubs are less structured than apprenticeship and internship programs, and teens in these programs do not demonstrate consistent attendance or retention.  A select number of club programs will qualify for transition to pre-apprenticeship or apprenticeship programs.

Data-Driven Decision-Making for Quality Improvement

An important tool that will support After School Matters and our program providers throughout this process is Cityspan, an online management information system. Launched in 2009 with generous support from the Wallace Foundation as part of the Chicago Out-of-School Time Project, Cityspan facilitates our ability to track applications, enrollment, attendance and retention for our programs across Chicago. As we strive to deliver the most impactful and meaningful out-of-school opportunities, it makes good sense for us to use Cityspan to track key indicators of program quality as determined by research and best practices.

Utilizing program performance data is not a new practice for After School Matters. We have consistently prioritized these metrics with the expectation that all programs maintain minimum enrollment and teen attendance rates of 80 percent. We are encouraging all After School Matters instructors to join us in this data-driven quality indicator initiative by utilizing Cityspan resources to monitor the following metrics:

via afterschoolmatters.org

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