Organization: New Pathways NOLA Inc
Mission: New Pathways New Orleans is a non-profit created with a vision that all youth in our city should have a clear pathway to grow and succeed in life. Too many times, children with special needs or mental health challenges, those born into poverty or those who find themselves involved with the juvenile justice system don't have the resources or systems to overcome their challenges. Our work is focused on creating cross-sector solutions to serve youth with significant needs in these three areas: special education, mental and behavorial health, and juvenile justice. Within each priority area, we act as a neutral consultant, partner and leader to build collaboration and problem solve for solutions through resources, expertise, and advocacy.
Activities: We successfully engaged partners in shared projects that would not have been initiated but for our leadership. Our projects leveraged information and expertise of individual partners in each sector, who have valuable information but alone, cannot sustain systemic change. As an intermediary, our leadership scaffolded all partners contributions to define a comprehensive landscape of existing services versus unmet needs, allowing us to better meet the needs of local youth. - We founded the Special Education Consortium (SpEC), consisting of nonprofit organizations and government that collectively support special education services, programming, and curriculum in New Orleans Public Schools. Members of SpEC are the Orleans Parish School Board OPSB, New Schools for New Orleans, the Special Education Leader Fellowship, and the Center for Resilience. Through collaboration and alignment amongst SpEC members and schools, we will improve and strengthen the continuum of placements that should exist in each school and in our system as a whole. We articulated a citywide vision for special education services for 5000 students with disabilities. We completed a first-of-its-kind comprehensive catalogue to document existing specialized programming for students with significant disabilities, and also compared known student needs to make recommendations on necessary program scaling and launch to better meet student need citywide. We convened a stakeholder group of SPEC members and charter schools to collaboratively design a citywide portfolio of specialized programs and iterate solutions to major barriers that were hindering specialized programs from launching or scaling. Our working group outlined the components of an effective citywide infrastructure to support school-based programs, and made major progress towards designing policy solutions to support this infrastructure. We look forward to this work continuing over the coming years. - We spearheaded a collaborative process to advise Childrens Hospital New Orleans on new services to address students unmet health needs. We interviewed school representatives representing over 20,000 students. We seated an inclusive steering committee with 20 representatives from schools, health providers, and government to advise Childrens Hospital, identifying 5 possible services: universal mental health screen and connection to services, tele-heath, family engagement, hospital discharge coordination, acute mental health crisis coordination. Using an inclusive rubric and process developed and managed by NPNO, four schools were selected to pilot a partnership with Childrens Hospital New Orleans to deliver the five identified services across four unique geographic areas in the city, some of which have been underserved. - We fostered public awareness about local youth needs and how public systems can better meet their needs and prevent justice system involvement. We coordinated over ten youth-serving organizations to interview over 100 local youth about their perspectives on crime, schools, community, and their needs. We designed the project and facilitated consensus around interview questions and data collection. Findings were presented to City Council. - We began planning a Restorative Justice Collaborative for public schools with high populations of at-risk youth.
NTEE category: Human Services
Secondary category: Education