Contact
Tag

Denver Learning Ecosystem

August 14, 2026 By RESCHOOL

The Provider Infrastructure Behind Access: What It Takes to Deliver Out-of-School Learning at Scale

Young people participate in a community-based music and literacy program with an instructor

Out-of-school learning access depends on more than family funding. This article examines the provider infrastructure, trusted partnerships, and shared visibility that help community-based learning opportunities remain dependable, accessible, and responsive to young people and families.

Out-of-school learning access depends on more than family funding. This article examines the provider infrastructure, trusted partnerships, and shared visibility that help community-based learning opportunities remain dependable, accessible, and responsive to young people and families.

Young people should be able to access meaningful learning wherever it happens. Years of working alongside families, community organizations, and out-of-school learning providers across Colorado have shown that flexible resources, trusted guidance, strong partnerships, and responsive programs must work together to make those opportunities possible.

That work has also reinforced an important lesson: access depends not only on whether families can afford and navigate an opportunity, but on whether providers have the people, space, resources, relationships, and systems needed to offer it consistently. As communities work to expand learning beyond the classroom, the infrastructure behind those opportunities deserves greater attention.

Family-Directed Resources and Provider Capacity Work Together

Family-directed funding is an important part of a more equitable learning landscape. It can make a camp, class, tutoring program, arts experience, or membership financially possible. It expands agency by giving families greater ability to choose opportunities that fit their children.

Resources directed to providers create complementary conditions that help those choices work as intended. Strong organizations need people, space, materials, coordination, and stable systems to create and sustain the opportunities families seek. Access depends both on families’ ability to participate and on providers’ ability to deliver.

Denver’s My Spark Scholarship, inspired by RESCHOOL’s Learning Dollar Funds, offers one example of how these pieces can work together. Originally launched by the City and County of Denver, Mile High United Way, and Gary Community Ventures and now led by Denver Public Schools Foundation, My Spark provides eligible middle school families with up to $1,000 to choose from more than 200 local enrichment providers. The model directs resources to families while also connecting them to a network of community-based opportunities, helping generate enrollment and revenue for participating providers.

This is not an either/or choice. Durable access requires family-directed resources, navigation, provider capacity, and ecosystem coordination working together. The question for funders and policymakers is how to strengthen the full set of relationships and conditions that connect young people to opportunities.

Quality Access Has Real Operating Requirements

High-quality out-of-school learning does not happen by accident. It relies on the practical operating conditions that let providers build relationships, create safe and welcoming environments, deliver programming consistently, and improve over time.

Providence, Rhode Island offers one example of what this infrastructure can look like at the ecosystem level. As a recent Getting Smart profile of the city’s approach describes, the Providence After School Alliance (PASA) has worked across schools, city agencies, and community organizations to make out-of-school learning more coordinated and accessible. Its model has included neighborhood-based learning hubs, shared enrollment and scheduling, transportation support, professional development for youth-serving professionals, and common standards for program quality.

The lesson is not that every community should replicate Providence’s model. It is that expanding access requires attention to the systems around individual programs. Transportation, workforce development, coordination, quality standards, trusted partnerships, and sustainable infrastructure all influence whether learning opportunities can reliably reach young people. 

National research offers context on why sustained attention to those conditions matters. The Power of Us workforce survey found that 69% of youth-field workers identified better pay and/or benefits as a needed job improvement. An Afterschool Alliance provider survey found that 81% reported concerns about finding staff, retaining staff, or both. These are national findings, not measurements of Colorado’s provider workforce, but they underscore the importance of investments that help youth-serving organizations remain strong and dependable.

The infrastructure behind access is not abstract. It is the instructor who can be compensated and trained. It is the coordinator who can organize families, schedules, and logistics. It is dependable space, materials, insurance, and administrative capacity. Together, these conditions allow community organizations to respond to young people’s interests and deliver programs with consistency and care.

What Provider Infrastructure Looks Like in Practice: Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea Provider Dollars

RESCHOOL’s 2025 Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea (GES) Provider Dollars program offers a practical illustration of what flexible resources directed to providers can support. Families helped identify the types of opportunities they wanted in the Globeville, Elyria, and Swansea communities. Cultivando served as a bridge between families and providers, engaging residents and working with providers to develop programs shaped by neighborhood priorities and relationships.

Through this partnership, RESCHOOL supported two neighborhood-based enrichment programs for young people: a six-week strength, conditioning, and mindfulness program and a ten-week music and literacy program. The spending distribution tells an important story. Forty-four percent supported instructor and mentor compensation and training. Another 18.5% supported program supplies and musical equipment, 18% supported program coordination, and 11% supported space rental and insurance. The remaining funds covered administrative fees and snacks and hydration.

These were not peripheral costs. They were the components that enabled six- and ten-week programs to operate for young people ages 5 to 15. The example is not a claim that every Colorado provider has the same budget or needs. It shows how flexible provider resources, grounded in community partnership, can help make promising opportunities dependable.

Visibility Is Infrastructure Too: The Denver Learning Ecosystem

Provider infrastructure is not only about what happens inside an individual program. It is also about whether a community can see its learning landscape clearly enough to connect, collaborate, and ask better questions together.

The Denver Learning Ecosystem, created by RESCHOOL, Moonshot, and Embark Education, makes that landscape more visible. The live site includes more than 400 organizations and allows users to explore the ecosystem through plot, map, and table views.

A directory cannot measure current enrollment capacity, open seats, financial stability, staffing needs, program quality, transportation access, or schedules. It is not a provider-capacity assessment. Instead, it creates a shared visibility and coordination layer that can surface organizations and patterns for further inquiry.

That visibility can help funders, policymakers, providers, and community partners consider where partnerships could strengthen what already exists, where deeper listening or data may be needed, and how investments can support community-based opportunities. A map is not a substitute for operating support, but it can make collaboration and more informed investment easier.

Strengthen the Ecosystem Around Young People and Families

The goal is not simply to expand funding. It is to ensure that funding, relationships, and shared information strengthen the conditions that allow learning opportunities to exist, respond to local priorities, and endure.

For funders and policymakers, that means considering the whole access equation. Family-directed resources can reduce cost and expand choice. Navigation can help families find opportunities with confidence. Investments in provider capacity can help organizations build the workforce, operations, and quality needed to deliver. Shared visibility can support more informed coordination and collaboration.

These components reinforce one another. When providers have flexible resources and strong partnerships, they can deepen relationships and improve programming. When families can find, afford, and navigate dependable opportunities, they have greater ability to participate in learning beyond the school day. And when communities can see more of the ecosystem, they can identify questions and possibilities worth pursuing together.

RESCHOOL’s role is to cultivate those connections: bringing together families, providers, funders, system leaders, and community organizations to make learning opportunities more accessible, visible, and responsive to community needs.

If we want more young people to have meaningful options beyond the school day, we must invest in the conditions that allow those options to exist and endure. Explore the Denver Learning Ecosystem to see Denver’s out-of-school learning landscape, discover organizations, and consider where collaboration or investment may be needed.

March 16, 2026 By RESCHOOL

Who Helps Families Navigate Learning When Choices Expand?

Youth participating in community-based learning with support from a trusted adult guide

As education choices expand, families need more than options, they need guidance. RESCHOOL Colorado explores why navigation and learner advocacy matter, and how trusted adults can help families connect school, out-of-school learning, and real-world opportunities into a more coherent path.

As education choices expand, families need more than options, they need guidance. RESCHOOL Colorado explores why navigation and learner advocacy matter, and how trusted adults can help families connect school, out-of-school learning, and real-world opportunities into a more coherent path.

Across the country, families are hearing a familiar message: more education choices are coming.

Education savings accounts, tax credits, scholarships, work-based learning, early college, and expanded out-of-school programs. On paper, it looks like a wider set of opportunities for young people. In practice, it often looks like a more fragmented system that asks families to do even more work to find, evaluate, and piece together options.

That is the paradox at the heart of today’s education landscape. Choice is expanding, while the structure and accountability that families can rely on are thinning out. Many families now have more responsibility for navigating learning, but fewer supports to do it.

RESCHOOL sees this shift very clearly in Colorado. For more than a decade, we have worked alongside families, community organizations, and systems leaders to understand how young people actually experience learning across their days, years, and communities. What we hear again and again is simple:

Families do not just need more options. They need someone in their corner to help make sense of those options.

This is where navigation and learner advocacy come in.

From More Options To More Complexity

Two big shifts are happening at the same time.

First, learning is decentralizing. Young people spend roughly 80 percent of their waking hours outside of school. Those hours are filled, in very uneven ways, with sports, jobs, caregiving, community programs, cultural activities, and online experiences. New public and private funding tools are starting to acknowledge that learning happens across this wider ecosystem, not only inside school buildings.

Second, accountability is changing. Traditional systems often relied on a fairly rigid structure: one primary school, one set of tests, one district that holds most of the formal responsibility. In some new choice and tax credit programs, that structure is loosening or disappearing without something else in its place. Families are asked to make complex decisions, track learning, and coordinate schedules across multiple settings, often with little support.

Parents tell us they are excited about new possibilities, but they are also overwhelmed. They want to know:

  • Which options are a good fit for my child, not just in theory but in real life with our schedule, transportation, and responsibilities?
  • Who will help us connect school, out-of-school programs, and work-based learning so it adds up to something coherent?
  • If something goes wrong, who is responsible for fixing it?

These questions are not technical details; they are the daily reality for families trying to help their children thrive in a landscape that is changing faster than the support and governance structures around it.

What We Mean By “Learner Advocacy”

In this context, RESCHOOL has been exploring what it would look like to create a learner advocate network that can serve as a steady anchor for young people and their families.

A learner advocate is a trusted adult or team whose primary responsibility is to the learner, not to a single program or institution. That person or team:

  • Helps connect what happens in school, out-of-school time, and real-world experiences so it counts and builds toward something larger
  • Helps families understand the full range of learning options available to them
  • Supports them in making choices that reflect their values, goals, and constraints
  • Stays with the learner over time, checking in as needs and circumstances change.

This is not about replacing schools, counselors, or community organizations. It is about stitching together the work that many people are already doing and creating a clear point of accountability for the learner’s overall experience.

In a more dispersed system, where funding and learning are intertwined across multiple settings, someone needs to hold the full picture with the learner at the center. That is the role we see for learner advocates.

What Navigation Looks Like On The Ground

Navigation is easiest to understand in practice. In our work, learner advocacy has included things like:

  • Sitting with families as they use tools such as the Family Choice Journal to identify what matters most to them, including safety, culture, logistics, interests, and relationships
  • Walking them through application and scholarship processes for out-of-school programs, sports, tutoring, and cultural experiences
  • Helping them stack different opportunities so transportation and schedule work across school, after-school, and weekends
  • Connecting families to new programs that match their priorities, not just the most visible or best-funded options
  • Staying in touch over time, especially when a family’s work schedule changes, a young person’s interests shift, or a program closes

Families consistently describe how different it feels to have someone actively help them navigate, rather than simply sending a list of links or brochures.

For young people, navigation and advocacy can also show up as:

  • A trusted adult who asks about their interests and future plans, and then points them to programs, jobs, or courses that align with those interests
  • Someone who helps connect a job or internship to graduation requirements, industry credentials, or college credit
  • An advocate who notices when a student is overextended or under-supported, and helps adjust their mix of commitments
  • A guide who helps families and youth navigate system barriers such as language access, technology literacy, transportation, and access to supplies or equipment needed to fully participate

In short, navigation is not a static directory. It is a relationship-centered practice that helps families and youth move through a complex system without having to hold every detail on their own.

Why Navigation Matters Now

The need for navigation and learner advocacy is not new. Families have always relied on informal networks, individual teachers, and community leaders to help them find and access opportunities. What is new is the speed and scale of policy change.

With the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit moving toward implementation, and states like Colorado planning to participate, the number of possible programs, providers, and funding streams will likely grow. If that growth is not paired with navigation and learner advocacy, the benefits will tilt toward families who already have time, information, and connections.

In that scenario:

  • Families with flexible jobs and social networks will be more likely to hear about options, understand eligibility, and successfully apply
  • Families who speak languages other than English, work multiple jobs, or are less connected to formal systems will face higher barriers to participation
  • Out-of-school providers that already have development staff and administrative capacity will be better positioned to tap into new funding streams, while smaller community organizations struggle to keep up

Navigation and learner advocacy do not fix these inequities on their own. They do, however, make it more likely that new dollars reach the families and providers who have historically been left out, rather than simply layering more complexity on top of existing gaps.

How This Connects To Reschool’s Work In Colorado

RESCHOOL’s navigation and learner advocacy work is rooted in Colorado communities. Over the past decade, we have:

  • Supported funds that direct resources to families and providers for out-of-school learning
  • Invested in tools like the Denver Learning Ecosystem website to make opportunities more visible
  • Provided direct learner advocate support to working parents as an employee benefit
  • Worked alongside community partners who act as trusted navigators for families in their neighborhoods
  • Developed and tested resources such as the Family Choice Journal that help families reflect on their priorities and choices

Across these efforts, the throughline is clear. When families have both resources and navigation support, they can access experiences that match their children’s interests and needs. When out-of-school providers have stable, predictable funding and are included in program design, they can expand and sustain offerings that communities rely on. When someone is paying attention to how all of the pieces fit together for the learner, the system feels less like a maze and more like a network of possibilities. And when students can articulate what they have learned and how they have grown across these experiences, it can open doors to future opportunities in school, work, and beyond.

As new public funding tools come online, RESCHOOL will continue to share what we are learning with partners in Colorado and beyond. We see navigation and learner advocacy as essential parts of any serious effort to build and fund equitable learning ecosystems, not as optional extras.

Looking Ahead

Education systems are changing. The question is whether those changes will deepen or narrow access to meaningful learning for young people.

If we want more than a patchwork of programs, if we want ecosystems where all youth can discover their interests, build skills, and feel a sense of belonging, then navigation and learner advocacy have to be part of the design. Families should not be asked to carry the full weight of a more complex system on their own.

In the months ahead, RESCHOOL will be:

  • Continuing to resource navigation and advocacy models with community partners
  • Highlighting tools that support families as they make choices, including the Family Choice Journal
  • Sharing lessons from Colorado with policymakers, funders, and practitioners who are shaping new programs

If you are a funder, policymaker, provider, or intermediary working on out-of-school learning, we invite you to stay connected and to be part of this conversation.

You can follow our latest blogs and updates on our website and sign up for RESCHOOL’s newsletter to receive future pieces like this in your inbox: [Subscribe to RESCHOOL’s newsletter]