Indiana

Indiana Afterschool Network

The mission of the Indiana Afterschool Network (IAN) is to build a sustainable structure of statewide, regional and local partnerships to advance public policy, increase funding and promote quality afterschool and summer learning programs.

Indiana Afterschool Network
Accomplishments: 
  • Developed the Indiana Quality Program Self-Assessment, a free online assessment tool for youth programs to track their progress using the Indiana Afterschool Standards.  In addition, we developed specialty standards for STEM, college/career readiness, youth mentoring and summer learning.  This is being launched to all 250 21st CCLC programs this month. Programs can produce reports, track their progress and create action plans. IAN can aggregate state-level results.
  • Forged a partnership with the Indiana Bureau of Child Care to merge our afterschool database with the state child care database. Beginning plans to create pathways for youth programs to participate in the state’s quality rating system and to build on the Indiana Afterschool Standards.
  • Leveraged more than $1.5M for STEM out-of-school time (OST) programming with our taskforce partners over the past two years. This expanded STEM in 73 OST programs, provided training to more than 300 formal and informal educators and engaged more than 3,000 youth in STEM.
  • IAN was asked to lead the higher academic pathways work for youth workers in Indiana.
  • Hosted our second annual Summit on Out of School Learning with the Department of Education for 600 participants.
Current Projects and Initiatives: 
  • IAN’s public policy committee is focused on strengthening Indiana’s OST programs through expanded funding and resources, promoting policy that strengthens quality programs, promoting a legislative agenda to inform and educate policymakers and building local advocates and champions among OST providers and partners.
  • IAN supports stakeholders in youth development to advance quality standards, assessment, promote youth worker competencies and raise the quality of OST programming statewide. IAN is also working with partners to develop train-the-trainer models for the online afterschool standards self-assessment tool.
  • IAN is in the final stages of developing an online program quality assessment tool to accompany the Indiana Afterschool Standards. From this tool, program providers will be able to integrate feedback from multiple stakeholders, customize the standards they want to measure, produce reports and self-improvement plans and integrate reports for multiple sites in one organization. In addition, IAN will produce reports at the state level to identify professional development and capacity needs for staff and programs.