This study examined parent leadership in an urban school readiness initiative in a northeast U.S. city. This school readiness initiative (hereafter referred to as Ready for K) took a unique approach by mobilizing parent leadership as one key strategy toward meeting its goal that every child in the city would enter kindergarten ready to succeed. Ready for K determined that parents in under-resourced neighborhoods could be the most effective "ambassadors" conducting outreach and engagement, and leading the efforts to connect families to early learning and developmental supports. Their approach was based on the idea that effective connections of families to resources, supports, and services are vital to children's developmental growth, yet these connections needed to be enhanced for subgroups of families with young children, particularly low-resourced, immigrant families who are the least connected to services and resources. Ready for K pursued a strategy of mobilizing local parent leadership to strengthen families' connections with school readiness support systems. It recruited community parents to conduct outreach to underserved and immigrant parents of young children to connect them with local resources. It also trained these parents to conduct developmental screenings of children birth to age three to raise family and community awareness about children's development and, when appropriate, early intervention services. Few early childhood school readiness or developmental screening initiatives involve parents as the implementers and leaders. Moreover, little research has examined parent
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