Carrie Collins, Director of Education at Beyond Housing
Our featured partner this month is Carrie Collins, Director of Education at Beyond Housing, a community development organization dedicated to strengthening families and communities. Founded in 1975 as a social service agency designed to help people find affordable housing, Beyond Housing has since evolved into the comprehensive, holistic organization it is today, with efforts spanning a broad range of impact areas, including housing, education, health, vegetation, employment, and economic development.
Beyond Housing focuses its efforts in the communities served by the Normandy Schools Collaborative in north St. Louis County. Home to the University of Missouri – St. Louis and within a 10-minute radius of three Fortune-500 companies (Boeing, Express Scripts, and Emerson), the area within the footprint of the Normandy Schools Collaborative has the highest concentration of poverty on the Missouri side of the St. Louis region. Central to the mission of Beyond Housing is the tenet that what happens in our under-resourced communities impacts us all. The effects of concentrated poverty ripple across the region with decreased public safety, failing schools, and limited growth and prosperity. Therefore, while Beyond Housing works to transform under-resourced families and communities within specific geographical boundaries, the entire region benefits.
As Beyond Housing’s Director of Education, Ms. Collins has a wealth of relevant professional experience on which she can draw. She has served as building principal at two local schools: Moline Elementary in the Riverview Gardens School District and Columbia Elementary in St. Louis. Yet while Ms. Collins might have her own visions and ideas, she makes clear that she and her team are intentional about which initiatives and action steps they implement, making sure that everything they do is aligned with what the community has identified that they want. Ms. Collins explains that they follow the maxims “ask, align, act” and “what you do for us, without us, is against us.”
The education arm of Beyond Housing offers several programs, from college access and persistence programs (including funding for ACT/SATs and test prep as well as matched college savings accounts) to coordination of wraparound services for Normandy students. Students within the Normandy Schools Collaborative can attend Beyond Housing’s culturally relevant, literacy-based after-school and summer programs. Ms. Collins reports that Beyond Housing operates the longest-running Children’s Defense Fund-based Freedom School (15 years and counting) in the St. Louis region, where “we don’t teach children to read, we teach them to love to read.” Beyond Housing’s educational programming features units on conflict resolution, community service, and leadership. There is also a focus on community action; for example, in a recent year, students traveled to Jefferson City to place paper plates, each one representing a Missourian experiencing hunger, on the steps of the capital building in an effort to draw attention to this critical issue.
Ms. Collins’s passion for, and pride in, her team’s work is especially evident when she shares about the family engagement liaisons (FELs), whom she calls “the shining stars of the education department.” The FELs are full-time Beyond Housing staff members who are embedded in each of the Normandy schools, where they build enduring relationships with students and staff. The FELs meet students’ needs in a remarkably wide range of ways. They help students and their families address concrete needs; for example, they can help families find employment, procure school uniforms, learn about the path to home ownership, obtain food, and access community resources (e.g., domestic violence shelters or mental health services). FELs host family engagement events such as “grandparent days,” where they balance what Ms. Collins calls “fluff” (fun activities designed to foster community connections and school/neighborhood pride) and “facts” (information about safety, resources, or other important topics). The FELs even manage to do laundry for students who lack regular access to laundry facilities. This support, provided in the context of the caring, longstanding relationships FELs build with students and their families, helps students thrive in and beyond the classroom.
With the focus on family engagement, and a commitment to helping children thrive, Project CONTACT and Beyond Housing’s education department are aligned in significant ways. In addition, Project CONTACT services are offered just a stone’s throw from two Normandy schools. Ms. Collins is enthusiastic about opportunities for collaboration with Project CONTACT and has requested that CONTACT staff present about the program to her FELs. This partnership seems like a natural fit that will yield compound dividends for children and their families in the community.
