Introducing The REACH Certified Virtual Tutoring and Family Success Coaching Pilot

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Written By Lakisha Young • Founder and CEO

I’m thrilled to debut our newest solution: The REACH Certified Virtual Tutoring and Family Success Coaching Pilot. This tech-enabled solution certifies the best high-impact virtual tutoring providers and connects them directly to lower-income families nationwide. Additionally, families are provided with timely, relevant, and actionable family success coaching that empowers them to optimize the tutoring partnership and increase their child's academic outcomes. 

If you’ve been following The Oakland REACH’s work over the last several years, you know we are relentlessly focused on our mission to build solutions that liberate communities across the country to create a life of their own vs. having one chosen for them. 

The opportunity gap between Black and white Americans continues to grow. Education has long promised to address this challenge, yet fewer than 3 in 10 Black and Brown students in 4th grade can read or do math at or above grade level. This is dire, and we need both in-systems solutions, like our Liberator Model, and out-of-systems solutions. This pilot’s North Star is to leverage an out-of-system solution to elevate families as effective change agents to increase their children's academic outcomes.

Since 2020, pandemic-era funding and the advent of AI have caused a significant rise in the number of virtual tutoring providers, and this trend will continue into the next decade. So far, this growth has left families behind who need intervention supports the most. This rise also means we have more providers of varying quality, making it challenging for these families to discern what providers can meet their children’s academic needs. 

All families deserve the “porterhouse steak” in every aspect of their child’s education, and our new solution sets out to do just that!

We are officially launching the pilot this week! We are hosting information sessions, conducting virtual onboarding meetings with families, and ensuring families are signed up with their matched provider before we all take a much-needed Holiday break!

This pilot will be a six-month research study. Phase 1 tutoring will kick off the first week of January. We are partnering with approximately 50 Black and Brown families from Oakland, CA, and Rochester, NY (inpartnershipwiththe National Parents Union). These families will be matched to one of our certified high-impact providers based on their family’s needs and have access to virtual, high-impact tutoring through REACH-certified K-5 literacy and math providers. REACH will pay for all tutoring costs as part of the research study.

About Certification

The first step in building this solution was designing a certification rubric and process. We then researched over 300 providers, engaged with a subset of them, and are excited to launch our pilot with three K-5 providers: 

About Family Success Coaching 

Families will receive success coaching from our Family Success Coaches (FSCs). Our success coaching content is designed to be relevant and timely, integrating technology for more automated support. Our families have a higher success rate with proactive and proximate support. During the pandemic, our Virtual Family Hub provided Family Liaisons. A remarkable 99% of our families found value in liaison support, and we had an 83% attendance rate when students participated in academic courses. We are eager to coach families in our pilot and learn more to find that right-fit support for impact.  

Join us on this journey!

We invite you to follow our pilot on LinkedIn and our newsletter in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned, and thank you for supporting our work to change the status quo, liberate families, and ensure every child has a fair shot at success. 

In community,

Lakisha Young

Founder and CEO, The Oakland REACH

Lakisha Young • Founder and CEO

Lakisha Young is Founder & CEO of The Oakland REACH, a parent-power organization that launched in 2016. She knows from her own story that winning in education is par for the course when you already have what you need to win in life — and because of that, everything REACH does is about ensuring every family has what they need to win in life.

Lakisha developed a formula that has guided REACH’s work since day one: Ask families questions. Listen to their aspirations. Build the solutions. Liberate our communities. This formula has produced a mix of groundbreaking programming and advocacy work over the last 6 years, including The Opportunity Ticket, which gives the most vulnerable students higher preference for enrolling in quality schools, and the Literacy for All campaign, which is about empowering the whole family around literacy to truly disrupt systemically poor literacy outcomes in underserved communities. 

During the pandemic, Lakisha pioneered one of REACH’s most innovative solutions to date: The Virtual Family Hub, a one-stop shop supporting families’ economic survival and their children’s educational success. The Hub has been featured in local, national, and international media, including Today.com, TIME Magazine, CNN, KQED, BBC News, Univision, The San Francisco Chronicle, and more.

Inspired by the Hub’s success and with families returning to in-person learning, REACH created The Liberator Model to train parents and caregivers in the community to become tutors in some of the lowest-performing Oakland schools. Through this model, REACH is now supporting the training and retention of ~200 tutors, providing high-quality, high-dosage tutoring to 5,500+ students across 38 schools. A study of the model called parents an “untapped pool of talent” and noted they were as effective as teachers in tutoring readers.

Lakisha is a respected national voice on parent power and regularly consults other cities across the country interested in learning more about REACH’s transformative model. She is a Senior Fellow at The Center on Reinventing Public Education and is a regular contributor to their “People in Action” series. In 2023, Lakisha was recognized by KRON4 as the Bay Area’s Remarkable Woman.

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