About the Nonprofit
Visit Our Website
Working closely with parents and communities, we ensure that children within the most isolated families are born healthy, stay healthy, and are prepared for school.
While Minnesota is a leader in education, children of color or children experiencing poverty are often left behind. Working with families across Minneapolis and beyond, Way to Grow aims to close the education gap of our youngest learners by developing programs and offering support that starts early - prenatal to the third grade. Our vision is that all children are born healthy, stay healthy and are ready to succeed in school and beyond.
Great By Eight is our holistic, evidence-based home visiting model, which builds a supportive educational pathway for under-resourced families. Way to Grow's program staff, called Family Educators, conduct regular home or virtual visits 2-3 times per month, and culturally and linguistically reflect the families we serve.
Through Great By Eight, we work to address persisting early childhood education gaps and barriers families experience in communities across the Twin Cities. Currently, about 31,000 low-income children throughout Minnesota including 12,500 children in Minneapolis alone lack access to quality early education and start kindergarten unprepared – one of the root causes of Minnesota’s worst in nation education gap.
* Family Support Services: Providing families with supports and referrals to meet their basic needs and stabilize the home, including housing, employment, and healthcare resources.
* Health and Wellness Education: Teaching parents about prenatal care, nutrition, immunizations, well-child checkups, and safety to ensure that all children are healthy and ready to learn.
* Early Childhood Education (birth - age 5): Supporting school readiness with the nationally recognized Parents As Teachers (PAT) curriculum, providing high-quality child development and parent education, and implementing evidence-based literacy and numeracy instruction. We also offer high-quality 4-star Parent Aware and NAEYC accredited preschool for families with children ages 3-5.
* Elementary Education and Tutoring (K-3rd grade): Working in partnership with over 100 elementary schools to provide literacy, math, and health education programming. Our virtual tutoring combined with the A-to-Z literacy curriculum is helping students close the education gap through specialized academic support for each child.
* Parent Engagement Activities: Family Education groups with a focus on literacy and math, new parent support groups, and events for families.
