Sustainability
Guidelines
Sustainability is an ongoing process enabling providers to ensure that their reentry education continuum persists through changes in resources, staff, and other components. A sustainability strategy involves not only identifying new resources, but also maintaining program goals, principles, and activities.
Sustainability Strategy
The following activities can help reentry education providers develop a short-term sustainability strategy:
- Assess organizational readiness and capacity for sustainability.
- Maximize resources such as staff, volunteers, and internal and external partnerships.
- Engage partners and key stakeholders and develop communication strategies to ensure widespread support of the program.
- Develop a sustainability plan, including funding strategies.
Tools
This tool will help reentry education providers assess their ability to sustain their reentry education continuum based on the critical components outlined in the Reentry Education Framework. It also allows providers to create a tracking sheet to document their progress with implementing a sustainability strategy.
This tool provides a framework for evaluating impact beyond participant outcomes, namely the impact that a reentry program can have in terms of raising awareness of the need and importance of reentry education programs, increasing knowledge about effective programming, and changing behavior of stakeholders in order to build effectiveness of and support for reentry programs.
This exercise will help reentry education providers translate a description of their program into an inspiring vision and rationale for making education a critical component of the reentry process.
Resources
- Handbook for Sustaining Standards-Based Education in Adult Education Comprehensive guide to implementing and sustaining standards-based education in adult basic education at the local and state levels.