Over the past year Cradle to Career (C2C) has had the opportunity and privilege to employ exceptional part-time team members. Our part-time team members include four data interns, a student specialist, and a parent specialist. Even though, each of these individuals works part-time their contribution and impact on the organization is huge. Let me introduce you to them:  

• Ayooluwa, our evaluation intern, focuses on helping us understand the effect of our work and makes suggestions on how to improve and increase our impact. She is a senior at John Marshall, so her perspective from the student and school environment is invaluable. 
• Deneene, our parent engagement specialist, brings parents voices to network meetings by collecting and summarizing feedback on our work with families. She connects well with the parents because she is a parent of young children. 
• Marissa, our very first student engagement specialist, has given us a deeper understanding of how having students on our staff can impact our work. She is also helping us create a position for a staff member(s) that directly engage students.  Marissa has gone off to college, so we are looking for a student to fill the role she created. Marissa is a recent graduate of John Marshall High School. 
• Sahej, our long-term intern, has helped create an internal policy, specifically the Data and Research Code of Ethics. Currently, she is working on an internal process assessment to help determine how we open our next network. Sahej is a recent graduate of University of Minnesota Rochester. 
• Misk and José are both performing community-engaged research and doing data collection. The results of this effort will help inform our team on which network we should open next. Misk is a graduate student at Winona State University (WSU) and José is an undergraduate student at WSU. 

These important team members are helping drive our work, bring new perspectives to the table, and keep our work community-engaged and focused. Think about it – who better to inform education reform than individuals whose current role in life is that of being a parent or being students either in high school or college.