Our Partners
Community Partners
Book Donation Programs. ICIC has secured partnerships with the American Library Association, Amtrak, Bozzuto, Capitol Hill Day School, Reach, Inc., the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and others that donate books through their book drives. We have also regularly received book donation grants from Junior League of Washington.
Boston Consulting Group. Through a fellowship program for which we were competitively selected by Fair Chance (a capacity building organization for community-based nonprofits that serve children and families living in poverty), we are receiving pro bono executive coaching and consulting on program expansion, building organizational capacity, and other projects.
Children Are Citizens. ICIC regularly partners with Children Are Citizens, a project of Harvard University’s Project Zero, to present arts integration professional development workshops for DC early childhood teachers.
Community-Based Child Development Centers. From ICIC’s inception in 1994, community-based child development centers, which are cornerstones of DC’s early childhood community, have been ICIC’s primary partners. We have worked with more than 100 community-based child development centers throughout DC’s low-income neighborhoods, including in Wards 7 and 8. We work both with struggling storefront centers in underserved neighborhoods, like Big Mama’s in Ward 8, as well as with large centers like Educare Washington, DC and Martha’s Table.
DC Collaborative on Arts and Humanities. We have been honored to participate through the DC Arts and Humanities Education Collaborative (DC Collaborative) with organizations such as the Kennedy Center, and the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities on the DC Cultural Plan and its collective impact work to ensure equal access to arts education across the city. ICIC's participation will help ensure that children from birth to age five are included in these efforts.
Any Given Child (AGC). A national network and framework for Collective Impact, ensuring equal and equitable access to arts education for every child in the U.S. Our Executive Director sits on the Equity and Justice Committee for local affiliate, AGC DC.
DC Public and Public Charter Schools. DC public and public charter schools have substantially expanded the number of pre-K public and public charter school slots for three- and four-year-old children, and many parents have elected this option over community-based child development centers. ICIC has responded to this shift by expanding our programming to DC public and public charter schools.
Easterseals. We are exploring the possibility of partnering with Easterseals to work with home-based childcare providers in underserved communities in DC in order to expand our quality, arts-based education programming to children ages birth to five who spend their days in settings other than child development centers and DC public and public charter schools.
Experts at Local Universities. We collaborate with experts in the education and neuroscience fields, including: (1) Dr. Bweikia Steen, an associate professor of Early Childhood Education at George Mason University, with whom we co-present professional development workshops on how the arts can help support social-emotional and academic achievement for children living in poverty, and with whom we are also collaborating to provide arts integration content for graduate level students; and (2) Dr. Jessica Phillips-Silver, a researcher in the Department of Neuroscience at Georgetown University Medical Center, with whom we developed our innovative Dancing With Babies™ classroom residency program, and co-present professional development and adult education programs about how our arts-based programs support social-emotional and cognitive development through all stages of life, from birth through adulthood.
Fair Chance. We have been competitively selected to participate in several programs provided by Fair Chance. Most recently, Fair Chance selected ICIC to participate in its Boston Consulting Group fellowship program. In April 2018, we completed a one-year Praxis Partnership with Fair Chance. The partnership was a chief catalyst for many of the organizational and programmatic gains we made in FY18 and FY19. Among other things, our intense work with Fair Chance provided the impetus for ICIC to pursue and obtain additional funding, which has allowed us to increase our staff size to five full-time employees, provide health benefits for our employees, expand our teaching artist team, and continue developing and expanding our programming. In addition, our Fair Chance partnership has connected us with new partners and funders, fueled our efforts to diversify our board, and aided our analysis of ways to improve our assessment tools.
Office of the State Superintendent of Education. DC’s Office of the State Superintendent of Education (OSSE) provides certification of our Naptime U.™ professional development workshops and thereby allows teachers to receive professional certification credit hours when they participate in the workshops, and OSSE assists with publicizing our programs.
Project Create. Through our partnership with Project Create, we offer parents weekend opportunities to participate in arts-based early learning workshops with their children at a beautiful, light-filled art studio in DC’s Anacostia neighborhood in Ward 8. Thanks to this partnership opportunity, we have substantially increased participation in our Read With Me™ family engagement workshops.