by Director, Mission Promise Neighborhood Richard Raya (photo, right)

The most recent data from San Francisco Unified School District showed 2,144 homeless students in the district. The majority of these homeless students, 1,345, were English Language Learners, and 1,093 were Latino. In the face of this crisis, a school in the Mission District recently opened its gymnasium to its homeless students and their families to spend the night. Though some parents and neighbors didn’t like the idea, many other parents, the principal and 100 percent of the teachers agreed that it was the right thing to do.

I’m proud to say that Mission Promise Neighborhood (MPN) will now be expanding to support this brave school, Buena Vista Horace Mann, and four other schools, bringing our total to nine schools in the Mission altogether. Our Family Success Coaches will work closely with onsite providers Jamestown, Mission Graduates, Seven Teepees and Instituto Familiar De La Raza to help connect families at these schools to housing, jobs, health care, legal services and more. We are aligning with the City of San Francisco and San Francisco Unified School District’s Beacon Community Schools Initiative, because we believe that public schools are where we come together to care for each other’s children, provide resources to the entire community and build the society we would like to see.

In addition to this K-12 expansion, we are increasing our investment in Early Learning by expanding our parent capacity-building programming at Felton Institute, Mission Neighborhood Centers, Good Samaritan, Support for Families, Homeless Prenatal and San Francisco Unified School District. We’re also taking our Family Success Coach model to 20 family child care providers in the neighborhood. Finally, we’re partnering with lead agency MEDA’s real estate program to build early care and education centers for MPN partners that can effectively close the gap in early care and education slots over time, especially infant-toddler slots which are the highest need in our community.

We are able to do all of this because of our recent two-year, $6 million extension grant from the Department of Education to continue and expand MPN.

As our Mission District community faces more pressures than ever before, we are working together to keep our families in place and to support their success. The partners of MPN are using our new grant to double down on our collective impact approach — collaborating and building relationships across silos and service system barriers, and using a common database to share information and provide wraparound services.

We are still in the early stages of this new grant, but over the past two months, more than a dozen MPN community providers and school principals have come together to work through the on-the-ground implementation details and remind each other of our ambitious goals. We are committed to ensuring that implementation of the next version of MPN will continue the progress we have made: more students graduating, higher assessment scores, and parents that have the tools to provide and lead.

It’s only fitting that we host our community celebration at Buena Vista Horace Mann, our brave new partner school that exemplifies the spirit of Mission Promise Neighborhood. Join us next week to celebrate this investment in our community, along with Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, House Democratic Leader, plus San Francisco Mayor London Breed, Supervisor Hillary Ronen and Commissioner Mark Sanchez, plus volunteers from Google leading children’s games. “Keeping the Promise,” Wednesday, September 19, 4 p.m., Buena Vista Horace Mann Community School. Food, music, dignitaries, games for the kids and more.

RSVP here.