Last month, we reported our FY19 impact numbers for the year spanning July 1, 2018 through June 30, 2019. As part of our mission, we help support and empower afterschool, summer and expanded learning programs and one major way that we do this is by providing them with professional development opportunities.

Leaders from at least one out of every five afterschool, summer, and expanded learning programs attended our professional development trainings or workshops between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2018. Leaders from a total of 90 program sites participated in site-specific or regional trainings this past year. We are proud to have been able to make an impact on these programs by offering hands-on, interactive learning experiences for them. Vermont Afterschool hosted 68 site-specific and regional professional development trainings throughout the state in 2018-19.

We collected 577 evaluations for the workshops that we ran in 2018-19. The feedback was encouraging. Overall, 93.4% of training participants fully agreed that they would apply what they learned in their programs. And 92.5% of training participants fully agreed that attending would help them do their jobs better.

In total, these 68 trainings comprised 32 different workshop titles. It was the case that for 14 of the workshop titles, 100% of respondents both fully agreed that they would apply what they learned in their programs AND fully agreed that having attended would help them do their jobs better. Seven of these workshops were attended by at least ten participants in 2018-19. These very highly-evaluated workshops with strong participation were as follows:

• YPQI: Voice and Choice (23 participants)
• Leadership: Why should anyone follow me? (22 participants)
• Me Power! Kids in Action Creating Positive Change (21 participants)
• STEM: Science on a Shoestring (13 participants)
• YPQI: Active Learning (11 participants)
• YPQI: Reframing Conflict (11 participants)
• Building Connections that Weather the Storm (10 participants)

It is noteworthy that three of these highest-performing workshops were part of the YPQI (Youth Program Quality Intervention) series. Vermont Afterschool has been providing support for programs in engaging in continuous quality improvement through YPQI for almost a decade. Stay tuned for an upcoming post about YPQI and programs that have used the model have been able to systematically improve their program quality over time.

Note: In addition to these site-specific and regional trainings, there were also professional development opportunities that were part of a series, such as our communities of practice and Leadership Institute for Resilience in Afterschool (LIRA) that are part of our Youth Resiliency Initiative to help program leaders increase their social-emotional learning practices for their programs. We will be sharing the impact from these very specific training initiatives in a future data digest.