Mayor taps chief student advocate to head Thrive by Five DC initiative

Mayor Muriel Bowser has announced Faith Gibson Hubbard as the director of Thrive by Five DC, an initiative coordinating resources and services for families of young children in the District, including early education opportunities.

Gibson Hubbard, an education advocate and former public school teacher, has worked since 2015 as the DC State Board of Education’s chief student advocate, a position that also features coordination among government agencies, community partners and families.

In an interview with The DC Line, Gibson Hubbard said her experience as the chief student advocate “really directly connects to the work that I’ll be doing in Thrive by Five DC,” including “connecting families to resources … they absolutely should have been connected to much sooner.”

The link between lack of access to early childhood resources and later challenges in life is something that Gibson Hubbard initially witnessed as a middle school teacher in Jacksonville, Florida. “So many of the challenges that my students were dealing with at that time actually were things that not only were going on in their current neighborhoods, but also things that just had impacted their lives over time,” she recounted.

That experience led her to graduate studies in public administration at Old Dominion University and ultimately to her doctoral dissertation at Virginia Tech investigating how to engage communities in decision-making, planning, and public governance. “A lot of the challenges that we’re seeing, there are a lot of answers to those within our communities,” she said. “And communities are looking for ways to be able to connect with that.” Gibson Hubbard is slated to defend that dissertation this May.

Prior roles for Gibson Hubbard have also included acting as president of the Ward Five Council on Education, and as a member of the advisory committee on DC Public Schools boundaries. She currently serves on the Board of Library Trustees for the DC Public LIbrary and is a DC regional board member for Reading Partners DC.

Mayor Bowser launched Thrive by Five DC in May 2017, with a stated goal to “empower and support families with young children through a holistic approach to healthy childhood development.” The effort focuses on improving equity and access in child care, early childhood education, and pediatric health care. Its centerpiece is a one-stop web platform, thrivebyfive.dc.gov, providing online connections to a variety of programs and services in the District. Gibson Hubbard will be the program’s first director.

Eventually, Gibson Hubbard would like to improve and expand the website for both computer and smartphone platforms. She also envisions “kind of a hotline, too, where people can call and also be able to get those supports that they need, or also be able to come in and interface with staff that we will hopefully have in the future … to help them navigate this very confusing space.”

Gibson Hubbard sees her role, at least in the early months, as taking in feedback from families and community partners about the current state of affairs. “You can’t really take action or expect people to also buy into anything or feel that they are a part of something without taking that time to listen,” she said. “While there are already some priorities that have been set by the mayor, I believe before fleshing any of those out any more it would really require some deep listening within the community.”

That approach, she believes, is important to establishing “a true partnership, that perhaps the government is taking the lead on, but that is also inclusive of many of those other partners as well, particularly families and communities who are the ones who should be driving many of the conversations that we will be having as a part of this coordinating council.”

The effort to coordinate early childhood resources is not unique to the District.  Numerous states and jurisdictions — including Washington state, Montana, Detroit and New York City — have established similar initiatives. Meanwhile, overlapping national initiatives such as Zero to Three are headquartered here in DC. Gibson Hubbard hopes to consult with colleagues elsewhere so Thrive by Five DC can avoid reinventing the wheel, and instead borrow successful components of other programs.

Tracking how Thrive by Five DC affects outcomes for families will pose some initial challenges, however. Many established measures in early childhood are qualitative in nature, and finding ways to quantify them without losing context may be difficult. A first step will be determining what information is already being collected by agencies, providers and families, whether the data can be mined to provide meaningful indicators, and how best to present that information to the public.

“I think you just have to be really careful when building out those particular things. We’ve seen that with our state report card, right?” Gibson Hubbard said, referring to the extensive public input process prior to rolling out recent changes in how the city informs the public about the effectiveness of DC schools. “We’ve had lots of different types of ways to report on success of our schools. I’ve tracked that really closely over the last couple of years. And so we just want to be really thoughtful about that.”

Gibson Hubbard also hopes to focus special attention on maternal health. “Thrive by Five doesn’t just mean from the time the child is birthed but really what happens prior to that,” she said. “I think [that’s] something important to stress.”  

That focus jibes with recent mayoral efforts such as last October’s Maternal and Infant Health Summit, which brought a group of mayors, health officials and providers to DC for a series of public panels.

Ultimately, Gibson Hubbard sees her new position as an opportunity to “leverage the power that families and communities have in order to see better outcomes” for young children in the District by working collaboratively with parents. “I really see that happening in this work and through the investments the mayor has made in this space,” she said.