The Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation (CDEF) recently took over management of the website Embrace the Core. Below, you can read the message that was sent out to subscribers of the weekly e-newsletter.

A little over a year ago, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation launched EmbracetheCore.org to fill a key information gap among educators. The goal was to help teachers and administrators share ways to explain California’s new Common Core State Standards to parents and community members.

With your support and feedback, Embrace the Core (EtC) has become a one-stop destination for CCSS news and resources among both funders and educators. Since our launch, we’ve reached over 9,000 readers, 850 of whom receive our weekly newsletter. We’ve heard from several of you that the site has been a strong tool towards CCSS adoption in California.

We are hoping now to expand that expertise through a change in editorial leadership. It is with great excitement that we announce the transition of EtC to our friends at the Californians Dedicated to Education Foundation(CDEF). CDEF is committed to keeping the site engaged in California’s education conversation and with the state’s largest education partners.

CDEF has a history of working with state agencies, teachers, and parents to strengthen our children’s learning. In fact, SVCF worked closely with CDEF to develop the CCSS communications toolkit that was available to school administrators and teachers last year.

Moving forward, CDEF will continue the EtC e-newsletter and ensure that subscribers and website visitors receive current news and useful communication resources. CDEF also has a vision for the website’s content to encompass the Next Generation Science Standards, as well as future standards, collectively known as the California Standards.

To ensure the website can reach it’s full potential as a useful news and resource site, CDEF is planning to survey EtC users and seek input from it’s communication partners so CDEF can learn what EtC does well, what needs to be improved, and if there are resources that need to be added. In the meantime, if you have any feedback, please send that our way.

CDEF will have further updates for you soon. For now, you don’t need to do anything if you’d like to stay on the weekly email digest for Embrace the Core.

CDEF wants to thank Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and specifically Neha Singh Gohil, for developing and maintaining an incredibly useful tool and for being a supportive partner during this time of transition.

And, once again, thank you for your support, without which this website would not serve thousands of California educators.