Early Childhood Innovation for Impact in a Crisis: A Show+Tell Pop Up with Promise

During this May 12, 2020 webinar hosted in partnership with Promise Venture Studio, Kai-leé Berke of Promise Venture Studio moderated a conversation with leaders in the early childhood field who are advancing innovative and inspirational work during the COVID-19 pandemic to support our nation’s youngest and most vulnerable learners and their families.

Dr. Dorian Traube of the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California shared how she has been partnering with Parents as Teachers National Center for several years to develop, deliver and evaluate the impact of a home visiting model that is completely virtual. Prior to COVID-19, there were restrictions in federal and state funding that precluded virtual home visiting approaches, but those have now been removed, enabling Traube and her partners to rapidly scale, delivering more than 12,000 home visits in the first month.

Breeyn Mack shared how Teaching Strategies, LLC, has worked to shift from a focus on supporting teachers in caring for young children to supporting parents in caring for young children. They are identifying and pushing out free content to families, including Ready Rosie videos and downloadable guided learning plans that provide tips for establishing successful daily routines. She explained that they also continue to support and engage early learning educators with nearly 40,000 attending recent webinars that explore ways they can continue to support families and children.

Natalie Renew described how Home Grown is working to support home-based child care providers, an important but often overlooked part of the early learning system that serves many special needs children and children in low-income families and rural communities. They have created an emergency fund to assist these providers and have released policy recommendations to ensure that they are not overlooked during response and recovery efforts.

Aly Richards of Let’s Grow Kids shared how she has been working with leaders in Vermont to ensure that policies and practices in response to COVID-19 are informed by research and on-the-ground realities. They gathered data on the child care needs of essential workers to ensure they were being met, created a pop-up supply chain to ensure providers had the health and cleaning supplies they needed to operate safely, hosted weekly webinars to help providers navigate the various federal stimulus programs and started creating a stabilization program to help both families and providers.

Dr. James Venza of The Lourie Center for Children’s Social & Emotional Wellness described the organization’s Therapeutic Nursery Program, a relationship-focused early learning program for young children with emotional and behavioral problems and their families. He also explained how Project ECHO represents a platform for scaling the program by providing tele-consultation to programs and providers in the pediatric community, including child care provides, pediatricians and schools.

Unfortunately, we do not have a recording for this session.