Systems Building

• Community Wealth Partners Six Steps To Get Intentional About Your Partnerships As the social sector increasingly recognizes the importance of addressing the root causes of systemic challenges, it is becoming more critical to form strong partnerships. Partnerships have myriad benefits for individual organizations—from boosting efficiency to growing their influence—but the true potential of partnerships is transformational. If we can forge meaningful partnerships, we can help change systems.

Family Support

• Child Trends Helping Young Children Who Have Experienced Trauma: Policies and Strategies for Early Care and Education This report from Child Trends and the National Center for Children in Poverty includes a review of the prevalence of early childhood trauma and its effects. The report offers promising strategies for child care and preschool programs looking to help young children who have endured trauma, and presents recommendations for policymakers to support trauma-informed early care.
• Council for a Strong America Parenting Works: The Public Safety and Economic Benefits of Home Visiting This report highlights the benefits of home visiting programs that go beyond the family, such as improved public safety and a stronger economy.

Equity

• Community Wealth Partners How To Get Real About Racism In Philanthropy Grantmaking organizations often fund specific issue areas like education, health or criminal justice. Yet these issue areas are so intertwined and rooted in systemic racism that to address one, you have to address a wide range of intricately connected challenges. Grassroots organizations working at the community level know this and work tirelessly to meet the wide-ranging and complex needs of their community members. At the same time, they face a number of barriers to getting funding to serve families in this way.
• New America Contours of the Field: Engaging Parents of English Learners The NASEM report goes on to explain that there is a common misconception by school personnel that parents of EL students are disinterested in their children’s education (see page 7-22). However, EL parents report receiving less communication from schools than non-EL parents, despite being just as likely as non-EL parents to want their children to succeed in school. These findings imply that parental apathy is not a major barrier to EL families’ participation in schools. Rather, there are likely some other factors contributing to the disparity in parental engagement between EL and non-EL students. So, what are the practical barriers to family engagement that must be addressed so that school-family communication and engagement improves for EL students?

 Early Learning

• First Five Years Fund: As political polarization becomes more extreme, early childhood education unites American voters. At a time when divisive rhetoric, calls for resistance, and partisan distrust dominate the political headlines across the country, public support for investing in quality early childhood education from birth through age five has emerged as a unifying issue among American voters of every political persuasion. The First Five Years Fund’s 2017 national bipartisan poll found that every single proposal tested—including expanding the federal partnership with states and communities through grants to improve access to preschool, tripling the current child care tax credit, and even providing greater funding for programs like Head Start—received overwhelming voter support regardless of partisan affiliation.
• Common Sense Watching Gender: How Stereotypes in Movies and on TV Impact Kids’ Development And, finally, through our Common Sense Kids Action arm, we will advocate for broad policy changes such as child care benefits, paid sick days, family and medical leave, and higher wages for child care providers to enhance the value of caregiving by both men and women. When media shows caregiving as feminine work and devalues that work, it undermines political and cultural support for paid family leave and affordable quality child care. Policymakers need to step up and let parents of both genders be caregivers.
• New America Surprising Results in Study of Child Care Hiring Practices Imagine you’re applying for a teaching position at a child care center. You have a college GPA of 3.8, two years’ previous teaching experience with a well-regarded program, and a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education. You’d have to feel pretty confident in your chances of being called in for an interview, especially considering the fact that you’re competing against other candidates with less education and experience. New research suggests your confidence might be unfounded. A study published by the Institute of Labor Economics has turned up several surprising facts about what child care directors look for in teaching applicants.
• State Capacity Building Center NSECE Summary Briefs The Center has issued a set of six easy to use briefs from the National Survey of Early Care and Education. The National Survey of Early Care and Education reached 12,000 families and large numbers of home-based and center-based programs (6,000 home-based providers, 5,600 classroom staff, and 8,200 program directors). The briefs provide practical, useable information to inform state and local planning and implementation.
• Early Childhood Data Collaborative Building collaboration to coordinate early childhood data: State spotlight on Wisconsin This case study of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Integrated Data System (WI ECIDS) highlights how leaders in Wisconsin leveraged funds from their RTT-ELC grant to expand their data systems for early care and education programs and connect early childhood data with the State’s K-12 education data.
• Administration for Children and Families Infant/Toddler Resource Guide The Child Care State Capacity Building Center (SCBC) released several new resources that support policies and practices to increase the supply of high-quality infant and toddler child care.

• NWLC Red Light Green Light: State Child Care Assistance Policies 2016 Given the importance of child care assistance to the well-being of parents and their children, it is essential for states to have strong child care assistance policies. This report examines states’ policies in five key areas–income eligibility limits to qualify for child care assistance, waiting lists for child care assistance, copayments required of parents receiving child care assistance, reimbursement rates for child care providers serving families receiving child care assistance, and eligibility for child care assistance for parents searching for a job. These policies are fundamental to determining families’ ability to obtain child care assistance and the extent of help that assistance provides.

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