Brandon Hubbard-Heitz, Chief Strategy Officer
Inside the Out-of-School Time Alliance’s 2025–2026 progress and the work ahead for Hamilton County’s children and families
From Crisis Response to Systems Change
Each day, buses and cars carry children to school. Pediatricians treat fevers and sore throats. Parents refill their kitchen cabinets after visiting the grocery store or food pantry. Children crack open Chromebooks and complete their homework.
The systems that make all this possible often go unnoticed. They tend to function so well that they become invisible until a crisis reveals how essential—and fragile—they are. COVID-19 did exactly that, exposing how deeply children’s well-being depends on transportation, schools, health care, food access, and technology.
As those systems came under strain, the OST sector emerged as another essential component of the infrastructure children and families rely on. Hamilton County’s OST providers, organized through the OST Alliance, helped meet urgent needs for food, health, technology, and safe learning environments. Their work comforted children, stabilized families, and helped keep schools open when many districts remained closed.
Since then, the partnerships forged during COVID-19 have become a foundation for more proactive systems change, grounded in the understanding that OST is not extra. It is part of what children and families need to thrive.
Turning Collaboration Into Community Infrastructure
Over the past four years, the OST Alliance has become more than a forum for exchanging information; it is a network for shared learning and collective action.
The year’s most significant development came from Chattanooga 2.0’s selection for the Wallace Foundation’s Advancing Opportunities for Adolescents initiative, a multi-year investment that will help connect OST providers with schools, government, philanthropy, families, and young people in building a more coordinated adolescent opportunity system.
Our latest OST Impact Report details this progress, the lessons learned, and the work still ahead for the Alliance. The initiatives listed below are just a few highlights from the past year:
New Initiatives
Chattanooga 2.0 began building the infrastructure needed for a cross-sector adolescent opportunity system after being selected to join the Wallace Foundation’s Advancing Opportunities for Adolescents (AOA) initiative in October 2025. With the Foundation’s investment of approximately $6 million to $10 million in Hamilton County–Chattanooga over the life of the initiative, Chattanooga 2.0 and its partners will bring together OST providers, schools, government, philanthropy, families, and young people to build a stronger ecosystem in which adolescents can be known, supported, challenged, and connected to opportunities that help them thrive.
Chattanooga 2.0 partnered with the Children’s Funding Project and members of the OST Alliance to develop a cost model for afterschool and summer programming in Hamilton County. The cost model gives providers a practical way to explore what it would take to expand enrollment, increase staff pay, extend program hours, open another site or add transportation, while giving funders a clearer picture of the true cost of quality programming.
To learn more and explore how to utilize the cost analysis to inform your organization’s afterschool or summer cost planning efforts, please reach out to Ashley Williams to schedule a consultation session at ashley@chatt2.org
The OST Alliance released a new Family Engagement Playbook to help providers strengthen relationships with families in practical, concrete ways. The resource builds on years of Alliance learning around Community Involvement Standard #1, which focuses on family engagement through supportive communication. Rather than offering a one-size-fits-all approach, the playbook is organized around seven barriers providers commonly face, allowing providers to start with the challenge they are experiencing and choose small, high-leverage practices they can adapt.
Ongoing Initiatives
The Chattanooga Future Fund provides Hamilton County public school students with free, community-supported, $100-seeded career and college savings accounts, encouraging a community-wide culture of future planning and asset-building. Over the past year, OST providers helped move the Future Fund from awareness to engagement, incorporating Future Fund information into family outreach efforts, connecting families to account activation opportunities, and sharing feedback with Future Fund staff about barriers in the enrollment process. Since the 2024–2025 Impact Report, Future Fund enrollment increased from 2,500 to 6,700 students.
The OST K–2 Literacy Toolkit helps OST providers offer literacy-rich experiences that align with Hamilton County Schools’ K–2 literacy curriculum while remaining practical for afterschool and summer settings. The toolkit remained an active part of Chattanooga 2.0’s broader literacy strategy in 2025–2026, including expansion of the toolkit to additional early elementary grades and training for staff at partner organizations.
First launched in 2024–2025, the Hamilton County OST Program Locator helps families, educators, and community partners identify out-of-school time programs by location, age group, program focus, and other key features. The tool remained an important piece of shared access infrastructure for the OST Alliance in 2025–2026, offering both a picture of the reach of the local OST sector and a way to identify gaps in access that may require future coordination, investment, or policy attention.
NEXT STEPS
Now more than ever before, the Alliance is positioned to help build a community in which every child has a bright start that leads to a thriving future. As the Alliance enters 2026–2027 with new dedicated Chattanooga 2.0 staff capacity—including the addition of Dr. Jasmine Fernández, Director of Adolescent Strategy and Collective Impact—it is positioned to move beyond piecemeal initiatives toward a more integrated approach. By building on stronger relationships, shared tools, local evidence, and greater youth leadership, the Alliance can truly expand access, improve quality, and elevate the impact of out-of-school time across Hamilton County.
You can read the full 2025-2026 OST Alliance Impact Report, here.
