Cultural connections make children and their families feel like they fully belong to a community, which is why SAELI aims to empower families and increase access to resources. Parent centers and advocacy efforts are among the strategies that enable the collaborative to involve families in the community.

Sandwiched between San Diego and Los Angeles, Santa Ana is the in the U.S., among cities with more than 300,000 residents. , according to data from the 2020 Orange County Census Atlas. Rigo Rodriguez, founder of SAELI, these statistics stem from global immigration trends, as well as the heavy reliance on low-wage immigrant labor in the service and construction sectors in Orange County.

“Because of this density and reliance on immigrant labor as essential workers, Santa Ana became the epicenter of the COVID pandemic here in Orange County,” says Rodriguez, who also serves as Chair of the Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Long Beach.

SAELI takes a comprehensive approach to working with first-generation immigrant families and low-income families with young children. Rodriguez, who is on the board of Santa Ana Unified School District, helps to maintain close ties between the district, the organization and the community. 

In 2016, when SAELI was launched through a grant from , a public agency dedicated to the healthy development of young children, the school district only had 313 preschool slots in 8 of its 33 elementary schools, and most of the parent centers were located in the secondary schools. Today, the district has 1,560 preschool slots across 31 schools, covering nearly 70% of incoming kindergartners. Moreover, every elementary school has a wellness center open to the entire community with a full-time family and community engagement liaison connecting parents to resources and opportunities. SAELI also uses the (EDI), a tool developed in Canada in the 1990s and administered by UCLA, to track progress in kindergarten readiness across five domains: language and cognitive development; communication skills and general knowledge; emotional maturity; social competence; and physical health.

“This comprehensive approach,” Rodriguez explains, “requires an active alliance between city government, over 20 nonprofit agencies, the school district and over 250 active parents hailing from 24 elementary schools.” 

As a grassroots coalition, the collaborative has exceptionally strong community ties, says Andres Bustamante, an associate professor at University of California, Irvine School of Education, who collaborated with SAELI on the design and implementation of , a project that brings together science of learning and urban design, through a grant from the National Science Foundation. The project has implemented a number of solutions to promote everyday opportunities for learning and development among young children and their caregivers. For example, they’ve installed signs inside local supermarkets to spark conversation while food shopping. And a giant abacus at a local bus stop was co-designed by SAELI caregivers to inspire caregivers and children to count together while they wait for the bus. 

“I’ve seen groups beg for participation without getting much of a response,” he explains, “whereas our biggest problem with SAELI is, when we say we want 10 families, they get back to us and say, ‘Okay, we have 40 families.’” 

These families aren’t afraid to express their opinions. Bustamante describes unveiling the mockup of a mural depicting people walking around Santa Ana. One of the moms raised her hand and said, “Something doesn’t feel right here. All these people are all facing different directions, but that’s not how we walk. We don’t walk alone. We walk together as a family.” Bustamante and his team set about revising the mural. 

Wendy G. Gomez, the director of SAELI, embodies the collaborative’s commitment to parent leadership. She started as a parent volunteer with the initiative when the younger of her two sons was in first grade. Although she studied education in college, her career had gone in another direction, and she was working in the finance department of an insurance company. By her second SAELI meeting, she was hooked, and took advantage of the various ways families could get involved, from conducting job interviews to serving on committees. Soon she applied to be a promotora — a community health worker who helps SAELI with outreach in Spanish-speaking areas — a position she held for a year before becoming project coordinator. 

In addition to trusting her own instincts as a leader, Gomez has gained confidence in valuing the voices of Santa Ana residents. “I had assumed that when a funder said, ‘jump,’ my response would be, ‘how high?’” she says. “But that’s not how we do things. We go back to the families and say, ‘Hey, this is an opportunity that we have. What do you think?’”

Gomez says that community members organize resource fairs, neighborhood workshops and often raise issues that, while not directly connected to academics, relate to children’s ability to thrive. Housing stability, accessible park space, food security and freedom from immigration harassment, for example, are priorities among Santa Ana families. In 2021, for example, SAELI joined forces with to pass an ordinance for rent control requiring “just cause” for evictions. Families have also led the charge to turn vacant lots into green spaces, through a partnership with and . Many parents remain involved even after their children enter high school and beyond.

“Families are now training [other] families in order to pass the baton,” Gomez says. “By building these strong networks, new parents and new arrivals have something to plug into, and their children benefit from the resources we have lined up for them.”

One of her big lessons has been learning how to give up power. “That’s hard,” she admits, “because we are all kind of in one way or another part of a system.” 

Reflecting on her own parenting style, she now realizes she “didn’t always look at the whole child, and how that includes the extended family.” When parents work, grandmothers and other relatives might be providing care during the day. Big siblings might be picking younger ones up from child care. A survey conducted in partnership with , a nonprofit devoted to parent organizing, found that half of Santa Ana’s young children are in the care of someone other than parents.

While Rodriguez recognizes the ongoing challenges resulting from decades of rapid expansion of Santa Ana’s population of children as well as underinvestment in education, he sees progress toward SAELI’s ambitious goals. “We believe,” he says, “that if children are doing well in math and reading and are socially [and] emotionally resilient by the third grade, it’s hard to stop them afterwards.”

BCC’s Chief People Officer Amy Clark says the policies arose partly in response to the pandemic. “We saw women leaving the workforce,” she recalls, “and we started asking ourselves how to help them come back. Paid parental leave, which I didn’t have when I had my children, is one important way we are addressing the problem. We also have a very flexible work environment that allows people to take time away from work to be with their families.”

Jon Williams began W&A Engineering in 1999 and has grown the operation to a collaborative of companies providing comprehensive development services across the country. He mentions a surveyor taking advantage of BCC’s family leave policy — 30 days paid — because of a medical issue with his child. “It’s an easy request to accommodate,” he says, “and it’s just the right thing to do. How do you expect somebody to come to work to be productive if they’ve got a loved one that they’re having to take care of?”

The impact of this commitment goes beyond BCC’s 150 employees and well beyond Athens. “Our employees are talking about this stuff with their friends,” says Williams. “We have an employee in Birmingham, Alabama, whose father owns a manufacturing facility. When she told him about our parental leave policy, our adoption and foster assistance policies, he requested a copy and changed their work environment.”

Williams also mentions a high-end restaurant group in Colorado that was struggling to find and retain staff until they adopted some of the policies they learned about through BCC. “When I hear one of those stories,” he says, “that is when I know that what we’re doing is working.”

To celebrate workplaces that work for everybody, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation highlights BCC in its . The roadmap also features an energy company, an education company in Denver, a car manufacturer in Huntsville, Alabama and a burger joint in Seattle.

Building on the positive impacts of the paid leave policy, the Chamber Foundation highlighted BCC’s “flexible hours” approach and positive company culture.

Clark’s philosophy is simple: “Just start with something. Maybe we can’t do the thing that the big companies do, but we can do something small like flexibility that means a whole lot to our employees.”

“Flexible hours and targeted shift scheduling are great tangible tactics to ensure that parents can address their children’s needs while remaining active members of the workforce,” commented Aaron Merchen, who leads the Chamber Foundation’s early childhood portfolio.  â€œThis simple but powerful step can work across large corporations and small, family-run operations.”

Originally from a “deep South” rural part of Georgia, Williams, 50, started working in his father’s grocery store when he was in seventh grade. His mother and uncle were teachers, and his grandfather was a high school principal. “Coming from a from a long line of educators,” he says, “I never forget the role that education plays in achieving career goals.”

When he started BCC, he reflected on questions like, ”What do I really want this company to be about? What do I really want it to stand for?” BCC embraces the mission of building better communities through philanthropy, green building practices, the way we consult with our clients and educating area students about career possibilities. During the pandemic, BCC set up a testing facility in the parking lot to assist the county and the community. Beyond these examples of corporate citizenship, however, Williams maintains that business itself has to change. As examples of the ethos he admires, he cites Patagonia, the clothing company whose founder Yvon Chouinard by transferring ownership to a mission-driven trust, and , which has become known for sustainability and ethical sourcing. He strives to learn from successful entrepreneurs large and small. Accenture’s research into what it takes for employees to be has confirmed his instinct about supporting talent.

According to Clark, “BCC is always trying to learn from other companies and do more. A great benefit of being part of the Chamber of Commerce Foundation video series was seeing all the different ways we could help our working families.”

BCC’s vision of work-life balance acknowledges that mental health is just as important as physical health. In , Williams says, “We’re talking about [mental health] more today than we ever have in the past.
 People are under constant stresses, whether it’s a mass shooting, a global pandemic or other societal tensions. Now is the time to discuss this and to not turn away from it.”

Currently, BCC’s health insurance is administered through a professional employer organization (a group that negotiates terms through collective buying), but as the company grows, Clark says they hope to expand family-friendly policies to include fertility treatments and other interventions that aren’t normally covered. “When we make these type of changes, people working at other companies hear about it, and they push their human resources departments to follow suit,” she says. “It’s a ripple effect.”

“Am I going to solve all this in the course of my career?” asks Williams, who appears in a (GEEARS) video advocating for paid leave legislation, stressing the business advantages of being able to attract and retain talent. ”I don’t know. But I mean, we’re going to give it a shot. We’re going to keep working on it and keep talking about it.”

But something is different. For one thing, all the moms are wearing identical black pants and white shirts. For another, armed officers are standing all around the perimeter of the exhibit.

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Leslie Bushara, CMOM’s chief program officer and Kelvin Chan, managing director of early childhood at Robin Hood, explored Family Connections in a recent interview with Early Learning Nation. It’s an experimental program that allows incarcerated parents to spend two hours with their children each month, away from Rikers Island — New York City’s largest jail. CMOM trips for the women started in 2018, and the first trips for incarcerated men and their children began in October 2022. Robin Hood is a funder of the program.

Bushara, who helped to initiate the program with support of then-Mayor Bill de Blasio and his wife Chirlane McCray, says, “Parents in custody are spending time with their children in a learning environment that is designed to support bonding, connection and healthy relationships.”

Because nobody — not even the staff — is allowed cellphones during the visits, she notes that there are no distractions for parents and their children, which allows for a deeply focused experience.

“The majority of women on Rikers are moms,” says Chan. “The majority of men on Rikers are dads. This partnership with the Department of Correction represents a formative step towards humanizing the population on Rikers.” He adds that the participants are pre-trial, meaning they haven’t been convicted.

CMOM is in the process of installing permanent exhibition elements at Rikers, as it has done in more than 40 homeless shelters around the city. So why have the encounters at the museum rather than at the jail? Although children are allowed to visit, Bushara explains, the experience is far from ideal. “It can take two hours to get through security with multiple checkpoints,” she says. “It is a very difficult experience for young children with many restrictions, including how much time they can spend with their parent in custody and a lot of the women say, ‘I don’t want my child to see me here.’”

Kelly Escobar, director of the Fund for Early Learning, notes that for young children, the environment can be just as important as the people they are with. “Prison visitation rooms are not welcoming. It is important for children to feel secure, excited, welcomed and loved, and the spaces at CMOM are special and warm. In them, it is easier for children and parents to connect, to have meaningful interactions, to feel like a family once again.”

The incarcerated participants come by bus in shackles and handcuffs, but they are provided with street clothes as an alternative to DOC jumpsuits. The children, accompanied by their custodial caregivers (grandparents, older siblings, family friends), wait inside CMOM to greet them. Sometimes there are tears. Sometimes there is awkwardness. But there is always great emotion.

One young father said, “I thought I would be sad when my daughter left, but instead I feel hopeful. Like I know the next step to take to make good, get out of Rikers and be a good dad.”

Fulfilling CMOM’s mission to serve all children and families, the trips support close, healthy relationships between incarcerated parents and their children—for the good of both parties, as well as society. Naturally, they are conditional upon good behavior, and they have the added benefit of allowing DOC personnel to see women in custody as parents, not as criminals. They have also proved to be a powerful incentive to comply with the rules of conduct. Rikers officers report an improvement in behavior across the board, a pattern they hope continues after incarceration.

One participant told Bushara, “It made me realize how much time I’m missing with my child, and I can’t get time back. I need to do better. My child needs me, and I need my child. I have to get out of Rikers and stay out.” She reports another saying, “I feel hopeful. My family feels hopeful.”

Chan views the program as a means of preventing repeat offenses. “Our mass incarceration machinery is dehumanizing,” he says, “and the system propagates adverse childhood experiences. This is the first step towards building those protective factors that are so necessary to end the intergenerational transmission of trauma, injustice and inequity.”

“We build relationships,” explains Rachel Campbell-Dotson, the organization’s executive director. Sometimes the relationship starts with someone coming in for a box of groceries, but Food Stamps don’t always last a full month, and after that visitor comes in two or three times for a grocery box, staff asks questions—not too nosy, just curious.

That first conversation might lead to a box of diapers or a car seat. It might lead to resume writing, life coaching or registration for public benefits. Inviting community members to volunteer is one of the Center’s strategies for engaging guests in job training programs. It starts with them feeling needed. They learn to use the iPad cash register at the thrift store, and then they have a job skill they didn’t have before. “People think there are no jobs,” Campbell-Dotson says, “but we have connections.”

The Dream Center collects and distributes used items. “Everything that you use, somebody can use,” Campbell-Dotson says. This past winter she obtained four twin beds for two boys and two girls in the care of their grandmother after her son had burned down her mobile home when he got out of jail. She also stocked their pantry, found them a couch and dresser and provided a Christmas tree with wrapped presents underneath.

“Serving this community is my love,” Campbell-Dotson says.

In places like Pike County, Kentucky, which has a population of about 60,000, the resources available for struggling families generally come from churches and hospitals. The Dream Center is a local affiliate of a , but Campbell-Dotson says her operation is mostly independent. , a Medicaid Managed Care company in the state, makes grants to support nutrition and other social determinants of health. A national $1.75 million investment made last year to is providing meals to kids and equipping families with food and nutrition education.

“We know that sufficient and nutritious food fuels the rapid growth and development that take place prenatally and during a child’s first years,” says Caron Gremont, No Kid Hungry’s director of early childhood. “The East Kentucky Dream Center is a critical nexus for nutrition and health care support.”

Last month, a baby was born six weeks early to a recently single mom, a 23-year-old who works at the local elementary school. “Pregnancy and child birth are scary,” Campbell-Dotson says. “Especially when you don’t have a partner.” The Dream Center provided easy-to-heat casseroles when they left the hospital and regularly drops off a box on the front porch with hamburger, chicken, lettuce, strawberries and other produce.

Addiction is a growing problem here, she notes, adding, “I’ve trained my team to take each interaction a step further and look at the root causes. We have to get comfortable having uncomfortable conversations.” The Dream Center helps people with substance use disorders, helping them to enroll in treatment programs and to secure transitional living arrangements after rehab.

Indeed, the opioid epidemic has had a catastrophic effect on this part of the country. , the state is ranked fifth in the United States for opioid overdose deaths. “Behind closed doors, substance use disorders are ripping Bluegrass families apart,” .

Although COVID has aggravated the challenges of hunger and addiction in east Kentucky, Campbell-Dotson remains enamored of the natural beauty here and the spirit of volunteerism among her neighbors, and she’s quick to point out the stories of people who have overcome the odds. Not long ago, for example, Virginia was a pregnant 15-year-old. Today she’s a registered nurse working to help families to get and stay healthy.

“You don’t have to be what you were born into,” Campbell-Dotson says.

In 1990, Issaquah resident Karen Ridlon became aware of the number of babies who were starting life without adequate food, clothing or beds. A certified Pediatric Nurse Practitioner working in well-child and newborn care, and newborn ICU support, for several medical groups, Karen saw the impossibility of trying to teach a parent how to feed their infant when they didn’t even have access to bottles or the necessities for nursing. She had read about a small “baby corner” that was working with Swedish Hospital in Seattle. She convened a gathering of providers including public health nurses to get their feedback on the idea, and then began collecting items in her home.

She reached out to people from area churches and her neighborhood, and to parents of children in local schools — anyone she could buttonhole to contribute, or to come help her gather and distribute the growing mounds of donated items. Response from the community was overwhelming, says Helen Banks Routon, who has been ’s director of development and community relations for 13 years.

“The project almost immediately outgrew Karen’s home,” Routon says, “so she went to real estate property developer Skip Rowley and said, ‘Can I have a little storage unit?’ Skip eventually said, ‘OK, here’s a 10’ by 20’ unit. Pretty soon she said, ‘I need more.’ So then it was a bigger unit and then a 4,000 square foot building and now, we’ve expanded to 15 bays in this warehouse facility.”

For 30 years now, Rowley Properties has donated at least 75% of the warehouse rental and have been partners in every way, she says, from serving on the board of directors to participating in fundraising efforts. With Karen Ridlon’s vision and Skip Rowley’s generosity, the corner has now grown into an agency that in 2020 alone distributed $3.6 million worth of products, averaging 12,266 orders for essential products each month. EBC provides for children ages birth to 12 and families below the poverty line. It now reaches more than 13,000 children annually and distributes more than 1.6 million diapers each year. Volunteers donate more than 30,000 hours annually.

From stacks of donations in Karen Ridlon’s house, this little corner has grown into a mature organization with an annual budget of $5,119,045, a fulltime staff of 18, hundreds of volunteers and a community that it both supports and is supported by.

The agency’s stated purpose, “To help kids reach their full potential tomorrow by meeting basic needs today” is both a mission statement and marching orders, Routon says. The model is not to provide direct assistance to individual families, but to “help the helpers,” through a network of agency partners including food banks, social service agencies, schools and others who work with vulnerable people. Families can access EBC through 238 program sites in the central Puget Sound service area.

EBC now has three hubs in the Puget Sound where donations are processed. The Issaquah warehouse often overflows — literally — with the community’s generosity as volunteers sort piles of clothing, toys, furniture and every imaginable accoutrement that could improve the life of a vulnerable child or parent. And some accoutrements that are simply baffling, Routon says, such as the gift of a bunch of child-sized sparkly high heels. The shoes never went in the clothing bundles but did make their way into table dĂ©cor for fundraisers. Some of the not-so-functional frippery gets routed to the Halloween section where it eventually makes some kid really happy.

The sorting, labeling, storing and distributing of all this generosity runs like a well-oiled machine. Streamlining the process has been an organic progression developed over time by volunteers and staff whose contributions are welcomed and implemented.

“It used to take way longer to fill orders — and we did a lot less,” Routon says. “The system is constantly growing and changing. Somebody came up with one part of it, another person came up with another part. These people who come in every single week will eventually say, ‘You know, we could do this better
’

“And we always say, ‘OK, great. Whatever works.’”

The pandemic has had a powerful impact on the work of Eastside Baby Corner, both by significantly reducing the number of volunteers and financial contributions, and drastically increasing demand for its services. Large corporate groups such as Windemere Real Estate, Microsoft, Expedia or Liberty Mutual used to bring in 10 to 50 volunteers at a time as part of their give-back to the community. The COVID-related stay-home orders brought those big gatherings to a standstill while at the same time, the need for goods and services skyrocketed.

In 2020:

• The number of product orders increased more than 33% over the previous year and recurring orders increased by 28 percent — indicating the need for EBC assistance to migrate from supplemental to sustaining, as families in need remained unable to move on from their constrained circumstances.
• EBC assisted 5,014 households, of which 3,306 were “first time ever ordered.” Meanwhile, diaper donations dropped 49% in 2020 as diaper distribution rose by 47%. The Rapid Response program provided 332,485 diapers.

And things don’t look a lot better so far in 2021, as 27% of EBC’s households now indicate they are experiencing homelessness.

The agency fulfills orders regularly, offering their partners a catalog of about 250 items, from newborn diapers to a craft kit for a 12-year-old, Routon says. On Thursday afternoons, the orders close and volunteers get busy fulfilling the requests. The labels not only have the child’s age and size but try to capture as much information as possible so volunteers can personalize the orders for the individual child and also try to be mindful when possible to provide items that are appropriate for their cultural or ethic background. Whenever someone receives items from EBC, they know they are cared about and cared for.

“Orders can be huge, like an entire week’s wardrobe in what we call a Big Bundle,” Routon says, “or it could also just be for a bar of soap. We just see how many labels have come in every single week and we pull those items and fulfill that request.”

Sometimes, life throws families very large curve balls and EBC’s team is there to meet that need. A woman might be fleeing domestic violence with nothing but the clothes on her and her children’s backs. A family might find itself evicted and unable to access its personal items.

“Three weeks ago, a family was burned out in an apartment fire. The woman was pregnant and went into labor,” Routon says. “Overlake Hospital called us and we immediately turned around a full layette, a pack-and-play bed, nursing equipment and everything else they needed because the fire had left them with nothing.”

EBC is now working with partners who are resettling Afghan refugees. Agencies such as the Afghan Health Initiative and Jewish Family Services can order the families anything they need to help them get started in their new lives. So far, about 150 Afghan families have been processed and settled in King County; Routon said she knows the need will continue over the coming year.

The need that EBC is addressing is by no means limited to Washington’s Puget Sound region. According to Joanne Samuel Goldblum and Colleen Shaddox, authors of “Broke in America: Seeing, Understanding, and Ending U.S. Poverty, one in three moms in the U.S.” now struggles to afford diapers for their babies and, though more than five million U.S. babies and toddlers live in poor and low-income families, no government programs provide diapers or funding to purchase them. EBC is part of the that grew out of Goldblum’s work and is working to address this need throughout the U.S.

Though the need is massive, these organizations’ existence demonstrates that the situation doesn’t have to be hopeless. It will begin to shift when enough of us personally respond to that question Karen Ridlon answered three decades ago: “How much difference can one person make — really?”

“I’d never been involved in politics before,” she says. “But it was that important. The children can’t contact their representatives, so I have to be a voice for them.”

Originally from Columbus, Ohio, Gale remembers how her single mother had to tighten her belt in order to care for two daughters. She describes how her teachers went the extra mile to make sure she had educational opportunities, how she worked two jobs en route to earning her associate’s degree in early childhood education, and these experiences have stayed with her as she makes room at Miss Tiffany’s for families on public assistance.

Gale has worked in child care for 10 years and has had her own business here in Weirton — 45 minutes west of Pittsburgh — for two years. Miss Tiffany’s educates up to 12 children between 6 weeks and 12 years of age. The toddlers go in the dining room, now converted into a toddler classroom; the preschoolers go in the living room, now converted into a preschool classroom. Gale says her husband, an x-ray technician, is very understanding.

When Gale advocates for child care businesses in correspondence with delegates and in person at the state capital, she emphasizes how paid leave proposals might actually make her operation financially viable. “It makes sense for the workers, for the employers and for businesses like mine because, after all, I’m a business, too.”

She informs legislators that Miss Tiffany’s opens as early as 5:00 a.m. to accommodate parents’ work schedules. Occasionally, children have to stay overnight. She describes a 2-year-old boy and a 3-year-old girl whose parents are struggling with addiction. Guess who ends up watching these toddlers when their grandparent has to take an extra shift at the mill?

“West Virginia did a lot of good things at the start of the pandemic,” Gale says. Deemed a “crisis child care site,” her business received funds for educating the children of frontline workers, but the reimbursement rates are low, and she gets paid only if a child shows up — even though she has to hold the space open either way.

Legislation hasn’t advanced at the state level, but Gale believes she has helped the delegates understand that child care must do more than merely exist. It has to offer quality education during the important early years, or else kids in poverty will miss out on the best hope for building better lives than their parents have. “We are impacting the lives of the future,” she says, “and we’re making minimum wage, if that.”

Dawn Huckelbridge, director of the , says Gale’s story is all too familiar. “This is such an obvious winning issue for both sides of the aisle,” she says. “Obviously, the pandemic has shown us all just how urgent it is for all working people to have paid family and medical leave. This funding shields the most vulnerable from catastrophe, and it keeps businesses like Miss Tiffany’s afloat.” Labor unions, veterans groups, racial justice organizations and health care professionals have signed up for the campaign.

Huckelbridge notes that a national paid leave policy is included in the federal budget package that leadership has said they want to pass in tandem with the infrastructure bill if they can secure the votes. The policies in the budget, like , are some of the most popular in the country.

Gale remains worried about the long-term sustainability of her enterprise. Parents pay her $150 per week. For all the hours she works, after she pays her two employees enough to keep them from defecting to Burger King and accounting for the cost of books, supplies, learning activities and so on, her profits come to barely $30,000 per year.

“I try to look at things logically,” she says. “And the way things are set up now just don’t add up.”

Cities are wherepar . But urban environments can feel built to deter kids and caretaking. That spurs families to bail on cities – – contributing to climate change through increased dependence on driving and inefficient housing. Kid-hostile urban design also takes its toll on the many families who live in cities.

Although studies on how neighborhood design impacts child development are has established clear links between stress and the developing brain. Ask any caretaker and they’ll tell you—the size of their home, the transportation they can and can’t safely access, the safety of their streets, and how easy it is to use parks, child care and other amenities, can have a significant, ongoing impact on the strain experienced by parents and, by extension, their kids.

These elements make up what urban planners refer to as a neighborhood’s “built environment.” The built environment can support children and parenting, or be just another obstacle to overcome. Either sets the tone for how kids and caretakers experience a city, says Christine Serdjenian Yearwood, founder and CEO of the family transportation advocacy group . It can influence whether, say, a pregnant person gets offered a seat on a crowded subway or if that baby bump is viewed as a lifestyle choice, no more deserving of accommodation than a bag of golf clubs.

So what does a city that values kids and caretakers look like? Planners knowledgeable in child-friendly design say that walkable neighborhoods with a mix of commercial space and diverse housing lead to “ and a strong sense of community” that help families thrive. Parks and other green space is also key, the Australian planning consultant Kristin Agnello explains in her book, .

Montreal makes for an inspiring example in North America. Teeming with green space and pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods, it’s also a city where considering family needs feels baked into urban planning.

Family-friendliness “is a policy that Montreal has adopted,” explains Faiz Abhuani, director of Brique par Brique, an affordable housing initiative in Montreal. “In some boroughs, this is their guiding principle. It’s like a religion.”

Paid Parental Leave and Universal Child Care

As part of the French-speaking province of Quebec, Montreal families benefit from Quebec’s renowned paid parental leave and – – two initiatives that in part sprang from efforts to promote the French language’s endurance in the province by strengthening families. This attitude towards children as an investment to be nurtured permeates everything from the government’s having procedures, to with family-friendly work environments, to a pandemic prioritizing parents for the vaccine. It’s an attitude that also informs ongoing adjustments to the city’s housing policies, transportation system and green space.

Housing to Fit Families

According to Canadian urbanist Brent Toderian, a key reason many young families flee cities is housing. Families need bigger homes, Toderian explained to . But because real estate developers maximize profits by building smaller units, without regulation of new development, housing designed for couples and single people dominates a city’s landscape. This is true for affordable and subsidized housing as well, with finding that in New York City, the affordable three-bedroom apartment is nearing extinction.

, Montreal now has several neighborhoods barreling toward unaffordability, and the city has long suffered a shortage of family-oriented housing stock. As a corrective, the city recently passed requiring major housing developments to set aside a percentage of units for affordable and subsidized housing as well as family housing, defined as three bedrooms or bigger.

Abhuani of Brique par Brique has concerns that the bylaw ties new housing to gentrification, and that real estate developers with no commitment to the community will be the gatekeepers for homes. But he and other advocates generally agree it demonstrates an important willingness to center families’ needs in planning.

Stroller-Friendly Public Transportation

Walking and using public transportation isn’t just good for the environment; it’s good for the family budget and health. In y, architect Nidhi Gulati makes a persuasive case for taking public transportation being good for children’s cognitive development as well, by providing brain-boosting interactions with the built environment.

But public transportation is designed with the single commuter in mind. that women using public transportation with children in Los Angeles incur “higher travel costs, elevated stress, and faced greater safety risks on transit than men.” Yearwood of UP-STAND says it’s no wonder “there’s this huge population of people that just opt out of public transportation because it’s not built with them.”

Welcoming a new child is when some families purchase vehicles for the first time, or trade in cars for gas-guzzling SUVs. Others stop venturing out with children. “We hear all the time that once people have young children they just don’t leave the area. And it most certainly has an impact on their mental health and isolation,” says Yearwood.

A leader in the global movement to make cities more bike- and pedestrian-friendly, Montreal’s public transportation is free. The city’s public buses are low to the ground, making for easy stroller- and small-child-boarding, and there’s a space up front with folding seats marked for both wheelchairs and strollers.

Its metro system has clear signage identifying strollers and pregnant passengers as a priority group for seating, and the entire system is undergoing a to become more accessible. Improvements, which include more elevators and clear barriers separating train tracks and platforms, will be a boon for small kids and their caretakers.

Montreal also boasts an impressive biking infrastructure that parents feel safe enough to use with kids. At the YMCA camp my kids attended this summer in a bustling neighborhood, children as young as 6 or 7 biked alongside parents for transportation.

Green Space to Grow On

Also significant: camp counselors and kids made use of not one, but four nearby parks. Research shows this kind of easy access to green space offers city dwellers a host of benefits: from mitigating the effects of extreme heat, to promoting well-being, to providing an arena where young children play while building gross- and fine-motor skills.

The greenery doesn’t stop with parks. The city makes judicious use of cement planters to slow traffic, and the city’s car-free streets, sidewalks and alleys are filled with whimsical, often nature-inspired and reminiscent of the “” of researchers Kathy Hirsh-Pasek of Temple University and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff of the University of Delaware. Montreal is also a trendsetter in “flipping asphalt into gardens, public seating or people-friendly infrastructure,” notes urbanist researcher and writer John Surico in his newsletter, Streetbeat.

That’s not to say life is perfect for Montreal families; locals have critiques. Many want to see the government-funded child care centers expanded so more children receive their quality care. A group of advocates and researchers noting fathers, too, often get overlooked in policy planning. And Abhuani of Brique par Brique says the city’s planning for families too frequently means “nuclear, white, professional families,” whereas the city has many multigenerational families under one roof, as well as families without legal status who face debilitating discrimination in the job and rental markets. These families’ have needs that will not be addressed “by green space and bike lanes,” notes Abhuani.

But there’s also a general consensus that family well-being is considered a key part of the city’s overall health. For parents enduring a global pandemic in the many North American cities where kids have felt like a policy afterthought, putting families front and center in city planning can feel radical, even revolutionary. But it shouldn’t be. As so many urban planners have noted, a city that works for small children works for just about everyone.

Photos by Kendra Hurley and Sandeep Prasada

But let’s face it: My family and I already have more books than we can read in our lifetimes. —the organization that gave rise to the movement and that has registered more than 100,000 libraries in all 50 states (and D.C.), 110 countries and seven continents—has reached the same conclusion. Maybe they’ve seen my nightstand.

“We’re known for being on White suburban lawns,” admits Greig Metzger, Little Free Library’s executive director. “We’ve had to re-orient our mission to meet the moment.”

The shift is entirely consonant with the Little Free Library’s origins. Todd Bol built the first one in 2009 in honor of his mother, a teacher and book lover. Over the past 12 years, the gesture has grown into a movement that prizes generosity, literacy and community. Bol died of pancreatic cancer in 2018.

There’s nothing wrong with expanding the personal libraries of suburbanites, but the organization has realized that it can unleash the power of children’s literacy by distributing free books in communities that historically have gone without adequate investment. “Children’s books are always the first to go,” says Margret Aldrich, author of  and the organization’s Director of Communications.

The books Little Free Library brings to neighborhoods without robust bookstores and libraries aren’t just high quality and age appropriate; they also tell the stories and show the pictures that resonate with children of color. So far, has provided more than 1,350 libraries at no cost to communities where books are scarce. “We get many more requests than we can fulfill,” says Aldrich.

She adds, “The research confirms the importance of getting books in their hands.” Scholars have demonstrated the impact of the The availability of reading materials is a big part of that. It’s also vital to foster habits of reading aloud and independent reading. Children need to hear adults reading, and they need to see them reading. Aldrich confirms that librarians love Little Free Libraries. , the Librarian of Congress, she proudly showed off the one in her office.

Last year saw the launch of the organization’s most ambitious effort yet. Although it is headquartered in Hudson, Wisc., many staff members live just over the state border in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, the urge to do more for racial equity took on new urgency. distributes books that address racism and celebrate marginalized voices—BIPOC, LGBTQ and more. The initiative involves partnering with national groups and on-the-ground organizations that really know their communities.

In May, to observe the centenary of a , Read in Color kicked off in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in conjunction with and HarperCollins, building and stocking 26 new book-sharing boxes. “Every single person here,” said Dr. Tiffany Crutcher—an activist whose twin brother was killed by police in 2016—“believes that our children deserve schools that are palaces, homes that are healthy, neighborhoods that are safe, and on the simplest level, they deserve to open a book and see themselves reflected in its pages.” Read in Color is also rolling out in New York, Chicago and Boston.

Last month, I attended the Read in Color ribbon-cutting ceremony at , one of D.C.’s largest multicultural child care providers. Watching a dozen or so young children assault the little ribbon on the little house with their little scissors gave me one of the most unmistakable jolts of optimism in recent memory.

Jordi Hutchinson, executive director of event cosponsor , said, “By increasing access to engaging reading materials that celebrate diversity, inclusion and social justice, we are giving children new ways to develop critical social emotional skills such as self-respect and empathy while also promoting understanding across communities and cultures.”

The construction firm Van Metre unveiled an example of the lovingly detailed miniature house-shaped libraries they were donating, and °ä±đČÔłÙ°ùŽÇ±·Ă­Čč’s Michael Yacob read to a group of preschoolers, demonstrating the power of story time—and of Bol’s vision.

“I’m a mom and a boss,” proclaims the owner and operator of Rocking Horse Child Care Center in Grafton, North Dakota. She knows all about how to run a business and how to take care of young children—her own and the two dozen or so who attend her center. She can do it all, pretty much.

But sometimes even an irresistible force like Osowski comes up against an immovable object, for example, a little boy on the playground who insists on taking off his shoes. His socks are getting dirty. And the other children see what he’s doing and start thinking maybe it’s a good idea to take off theirs too.

“It’s not enough to tell him to stop,” she says. “You have to get down on the ground with him and find out why he’s taking off his shoes. Maybe there’s a pebble in there. Maybe his sock feels funny.” When you find out his ‘why,’ you can explain your ‘włóČâ’­—his socks will get dirty, he might step on something sharp—and then maybe he’ll change his behavior.

Finding out why doesn’t just work on the playground. It also helps when you’re talking policy with legislators. “It was a very honest discussion,” Osowski reports. “I told them, ‘You’re the experts on bills and laws. I’m the expert on kids.’”

Osowski and her husband, who sells insurance, have two children of their own, with a third due in October. Her Rocking Horse journey started when she was working at a florist while pregnant with her first child. When her mother-in-law died suddenly, the family had to grieve—and also find a way to make up for the free child care they were counting on. “The possibilities were few and far between,” she recalls. “And we were way behind.”

Having worked in the field, she knew it was important to look for quality. The second oldest of seven children, she knew she understood children. Coralea was born in November 2016, and Rocking Horse opened in August 2017. They started with 10 children. Now they have 24, and seven teachers. Teachers, bankers and farmers know they can trust Rocking Horse with their children. “The waiting list is as long as my leg,” she says.

“Clearly this is what I was meant to do.”

That doesn’t mean it has been easy. The pandemic has been the most significant but by no means the only challenge. “Even with CARES dollars,” she notes, “we took a hard hit during COVID.” Twice they had to shut down when teachers tested positive.

“Staffing is a huge issue,” she says, acknowledging that this isn’t the most glamorous job. “We work our buns off for other people’s kids. There are a million different things to do every day.” Finding and keeping good teachers is important, because turnover really affects the kids, so she strives to be accommodating with schedules and also to pay a fair wage.

Public funding isn’t just a nice idea; it’s vital for her to keep the doors open. “That money is an investment in our community’s future,” she says.

During her Strolling Thunder conversations, Osowski explained how the parents rely on Rocking Horse so they can get to work. She described the desperation of parents in nearby Drayton, North Dakota, whose center shut down—something she says happens all the time. To make matters worse, , depriving the community of Child Care Aware resources to help find quality options.

Above all, Osowski stressed that the education she provides prepares the children for kindergarten and beyond. She describes a 3-year-old boy—not the one who kept taking off his shoes—who initially couldn’t count the tater tots on his plate. “He didn’t know his letters or numbers at first,” she recalls. “We had to play catch-up to get him ready for school. Where would he be without me?”

The birth-to-preschool years really matter, Osowski asserts. This is the age when they learn they’re good at things, that they can become bosses in the future, or do anything if they set their mind to it. “This is when their knowledge and passion come into being,” she says. “And we can’t risk that.”

A new joint effort by (a program of Kentucky’s Berea College) and is helping to ensure that rural libraries are equipped to provide a range of services to help young children reach literacy benchmarks. The , says Save the Children’s Lesley Graham, “weaves rural places together,” rather than setting them up as competitors, which would reinforce a scarcity mindset.

The effort launched in January and already has representation from all 50 states and Australia, too. School and college libraries are also joining, reflecting what Graham terms “the appetite for connection.” Partners for Education’s Dreama Gentry says, “Libraries are the heart of communities everywhere, and the hubs of rural places.”

Shannon Chaney, a children’s librarian in Putnam County, Tennessee, says, “The Rural Library Summit they held in 2020 uplifted and inspired me by not only highlighting the many ways that libraries transform children’s lives but also by introducing me to resources and ideas that I am now implementing in my community.” Chaney plans to integrate —the Bezos Family Foundation’s caregiver-empowering early literacy initiative—into her library’s summer reading program, and she’s partnering with the local leisure services department to work toward building a storybook trail.

COVID continues to cast a long shadow over rural America, where many lack health insurance and have pre-existing conditions that make them more vulnerable. Even before the pandemic, communities in the Mississippi Delta, Appalachia, Colonias (rural communities within the U.S.-Mexico border region) and across the nation were experiencing increases in the number of people without adequate housing, along with other social and economic .

Libraries and librarians have found themselves responding to crises beyond their traditional roles. Graham and Gentry cite a number of examples of going the extra mile during a time of extraordinary need:

• Lack of broadband and equipment during a time when education was taking place at home (and continues, even as classrooms open) prompted libraries to place routers in the window so users could access Wi-Fi from the parking lot.
• In Petros, Tennessee (population 715), the library is serving meals.
• The library in Holly Hill, South Carolina (population 1277), has been distributing boxes with food and health and wellness items as well as administering COVID tests.
• The library in Nicholasville, Kentucky, (population 30,301) hosted a Ready to Learn fair. Many are hosting workshops around Vroom.

A grant from the (IMLS; a program of the federal government) funds the network’s fellows program. In the first year, 22 fellows were selected from among 100 applicants. Reflecting the diversity of rural America, 20% are people of color. Regular webinars bring far-flung libraries together to learn from authors and experts.

The actor Jennifer Garner, a Save the Children trustee and ambassador, appeared on the first webinar, describing how libraries shaped her career. She recalls, “As soon as I found myself with a little bit of a voice, I started asking, ‘Who is helping kids in rural West Virginia? Who is helping kids in Kentucky? Who is helping kids like my mom, who grew up super poor in Locust Grove, Oklahoma? And of course that took me to Save the Children.”

The formation of the Rural Library Network brought to mind her upbringing in Charleston, WV, and a woman who made a difference in her life: “I know personally the difference a librarian can make to a child because my elementary school librarian
 opened up my mind. She made me feel special. She wasn’t judging me in any way, and she just fed me one book after another.”

Partners for Education’s Gentry says her organization addresses the cradle-to-career needs of rural populations and admits that historically they have focused on higher education access and other aspects of the later years of that continuum. Mission alignment with Save the Children—ensuring that all children are reaching their full potential—made this partnership compelling. She notes that these institutions, which accomplish so much for their communities despite often being woefully understaffed and -resourced, constantly inspire her. In many cases they are run by a lone individual who is not a trained librarian but who nonetheless knows everybody in town and goes to heroic lengths to help patrons apply for public benefits, write their resumes, register to vote and, of course, find a good book.

Disclosure: Vroom was created by the Bezos Family Foundation. This story was originally published on Early Learning Nation, which was also an initiative of the Bezos Family Foundation.

Semuels’ article asks important questions about this grave imbalance, but she overlooks the crucial opportunity—indeed, the obligation—it presents for philanthropy to demonstrate its value. Baby Bundle, an initiative of the United Way of Coastal Fairfield County’s , represents a sweeping effort to equip young children and their families in Connecticut’s largest city with the supports they need to thrive. Local philanthropists, as well as the fund the Baby Bundle. I interviewed Bridgeport Prospers’ Allison Logan and Janice Gruendel and they introduced me to two people taking part in the systems change it is bringing about.

The United Way Team

Dr. Gruendel, a senior consultant with Bridgeport Prospers and a fellow with the in Child Development & Social Policy at Yale University, notes that a single statistic “made the community shudder” and gave rise to the Baby Bundle: three-quarters of the city’s three-year-olds were not hitting their developmental markers. It didn’t take a Ph.D. to understand the long-term ramifications of letting this predicament fester year after year. In the absence of targeted intervention, toddlers who don’t meet their developmental milestones become kindergarteners who aren’t ready to read, with dire outlooks for later metrics such as high school graduation and avoiding incarceration. Behind the statistic about three-year-olds, Dr. Gruendel said, was “a community in deep pain.”

“We knew we weren’t going to program our way out of this,” recalls Logan, the executive director of Bridgeport Prospers. As she explained, in the past, when a crisis reared its head, the tendency was to fund or launch a series of scattered programs to try and fix things. The result was usually disappointing at best, with similar organizations competing for grant money to carry out home visits and other services. In one egregious example of what happens when services aren’t coordinated, an individual mom might have a dozen different case managers.

This time around, Gruendel conducted a six-month landscape analysis, which included extensive listening to families and the community agencies that serve them. These conversations revealed a shocking deficit of infant and toddler care, widespread intergenerational trauma, and ubiquitous implicit and explicit bias among other issues—but also a wealth of lived experience and an impressive lineup of natural community supports, including within the city’s 128 houses of worship. The word resilience came up a lot. Gruendel recalls one woman looking her in the eyes and saying, “If we weren’t already resilient, we’d be dead.”

Logan and Gruendel don’t consider themselves the leaders or the architects of the Baby Bundle. Rather, they are facilitating the redesign of resources that community members indicated would be useful for improving their own lives. The United Way team engages a group of “community messengers” who are paid for their time, engaging with families at the neighborhood level to ensure that community voice is ever present.

The Doulas

The Baby Bundle comprises a range of supports that extend well beyond the usual complement of early-childhood programs. Health care was one area that the landscape analysis illuminated. Doulas, the professionals who care for women before, during and after birth, were identified as one uniquely affordable and effective solution. Most births in Bridgeport take place at two hospitals, and ongoing health care is provided by two federally qualified health centers. Seventy percent of resident births are to moms on Medicaid—the health care program for low-income Americans, which is federally funded but administered by states. According to the National Academy for State Health Policy, only four states allow Medicaid funding for doulas. (“Maybe Connecticut could be next,” Gruendel says.)

Doulas have been around as a profession since the 1970s, but they are not well known in many of the communities where they could have the greatest impact, even though study after study shows that their presence leads to healthy outcomes for babies and mothers. Benefits include shorter labor length, less vacuum and forceps use, less use of pain medications, higher APGAR scores (an index capturing the condition of the newborn infant) and reduction in medical costs ().

SciHonor Devotion, proprietor of a doula collective that operates in 13 states, often has to explain what she does for a living. “Although the support we provide can lead to medical benefits, we’re not medical providers.” she says. “We provide constant guidance and support. And we are advocates for our clients.”

When young mothers lack adequate social supports, their doulas go the extra mile, helping them navigate food, transportation, baby items, car seats and more. The Earth’s Natural Touch 14-month training program covers not just childbirth but the complexities of systems, the social determinants of health, structural racism, grief and loss, and issues specific to teen pregnancy. Switching to online training during the pandemic has meant they can extend their reach globally.

According to Logan, it took a shift in attitudes within the health care profession to welcome doulas into the delivery room. Devotion concurs, describing a teen, who had just given birth and was asking to breastfeed her baby, but the medical staff ignored her, and the hospital social worker insisted that teen moms never want to breastfeed. “But this one did,” Devotion says, “and she needed someone to support her in doing so.” Another mom was suffering from postpartum preeclampsia—a condition that requires immediate treatment—and it was a doula, not the doctor or nurse, who spotted the symptoms.

The Deputy Commissioner

“Doulas can have a lot more credibility than the nurse or doctor on duty,” agrees Michael Williams, Deputy Commissioner for Operations, at Connecticut’s Department of Children and Families. He credits the Baby Bundle team for listening to the community and for adding value through data collection and science-informed technical assistance.

Williams, whose previous experience as a pastor and a social worker inform his government work, says, “For too long, authorities were confusing ‘help’ with ‘investigation’ and ‘surveillance.’ A more human public policy doesn’t blame the victim. Maltreatment prevention is still our goal, but we do that through keeping families together, not tearing them apart.” The shift in approach has brought about an increase, from 14% to 48%, of foster children placed with relatives or someone they know.

“Now that we know better,” he says, “we can do a whole lot better. And Baby Bundle fits right in the middle of that.”

Here’s why it’s so important. I recently had a conversation with a home-based child care (HBCC) provider who described being invited to a Hill briefing considering new legislation on child care. This provider is a leader among her peers, offering support and guidance, and is well positioned to speak to the provider experience. She was excited to be included but found the event intimidating. Ultimately the legislation didn’t represent her or her peers. This instance is both unique and all too familiar: that this provider was invited to have a voice in this meeting is unusual; that her voice was absent from the resulting legislation is entirely consistent with what we at hear from providers every day.

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Across the country we have observed a troubling trend during the pandemic, that while reliance on home-based child care providers has increased, attempts to support this aspect of the child care sector have largely failed or fallen short. Home-based providers have faced a triple-whammy of challenges: decreased revenue due to enrollment shifts; increased expenses for PPE and sanitation costs; and the inability to substantively access public support to maintain their operations.

Even when institutions seek to address the needs of providers, there are problems in design and implementation that leave providers out. For example, we saw states roll out CARES grants to support providers in re-fitting their facilities and purchasing PPE to continue safe operations. The grants required that providers pay upfront for these goods and services, and then be reimbursed with the grant funds.

On average, most licensed HBCC providers earn about $30,000 per year from their child care operations. During the pandemic, of food, rent and utilities. The requirement that providers spend several thousands on renovations or supplies upfront in order to access this funding meant that very few providers could use this critical resource.

HBCC providers’ inclusion in essential worker categories has varied across the country, meaning so too has their access to free PPE, hazard pay and vaccination prioritization. Even in places where HBCC providers are included, there may be fine-print requirements to show W2s or other payroll documents that providers may not have due to their status as sole proprietors.

The federal government made the Paycheck Protection Program, a forgivable federally-backed business loan, available to struggling small businesses including sole proprietorships to support these critical services during the pandemic. But because the program largely required these operators to have existing business relationships with banks and to show payroll records that HBCC operators do not have. Meanwhile, . This debt is expensive, includes many fees especially for later payments, and defaults can undermine credit scores.

As we have worked with HBCC providers we have heard hundreds of stories of attempts to access supports that are not well suited or simply not available to providers. We also observe a key fact: HBCC providers are not at the table when policies are made or programs designed. Providers are not included in governance structures, do not advise public and private partners, and are not systematically engaged to support program design or system accountability. It’s no wonder that these programs fail to meet providers’ needs — they have not been designed with HBCC providers in mind.

Beyond this, as we work with providers and marshall private resources and encourage public actors to be responsive, we have also observed that providers are finding some support and it is largely from other providers. COVID has crystalized for many providers a clear understanding that they must raise their voices and support one another because as a provider leader in New York City, Gladys Jones, says, otherwise “we are going to go extinct.” Gladys, like many other providers around the country, has started pulling together her peer providers and demanding a seat at the table to share their experiences and to hold systems accountable to meet the needs of providers and the children and families they serve.

For parents of young children concerned about screen time, ubiquitous media has long created tension, but the past year has highlighted the potential of high-quality digital programming to keep kids, and their parents, learning and connected even while they’re stuck at home.

“Just as stone tools were the technological breakthrough of early humans, today’s kids have digital platforms to access the worlds’ information at their fingertips!” says Michael H. Levine, senior vice president of learning and impact for Noggin, Nickelodeon’s early learning service. “These now ubiquitous means of communication and learning weren’t even contemplated three decades ago.”

This whirlwind history traces significant advances in the quest to make educational children’s television and new forms of media an engaging experience—instead of one where the viewers are merely passive recipients.

• The precursors: seeing yourself in the classroom. From the very beginning of the medium, children have been hooked and parents have been concerned: Is my child watching too much? Is it harmful? Could it maybe be a bit beneficial (because I have laundry to fold)?

In a  the scholar and television host fondly remembers watching Ding Dong School—which premiered in 1952— and following along as Miss Frances led activities. Ding Dong School was shot with low-angled cameras to simulate the point of view of preschoolers.

The following year saw the launch of Romper Room, which wasn’t just one show but rather a broadcast concept that started in Baltimore and soon spread to dozens of other cities, each with a different host. The original, Miss Nancy, became known for holding up the frame of a hand mirror and calling out names of the viewers she could “see” in their homes. Romper Room taught math, spelling and etiquette.

The popularity of Captain Kangaroo, which premiered in 1955, tilted children’s television in favor of entertainment rather than education.

Essentially, Miss Frances, Miss Nancy and Captain Kangaroo pioneered distance learning before the term came into existence, and the examples they set can be instructive for today’s teachers who find themselves on the other side of the screen from their young students.

As , the first-ever Early Childhood Teacher of the Year , “Teaching is about 90% theater. Kids are going to know if you’re excited to see them or if you’re frustrated.”

• The man with the cardigan sweater: seeing into your heart. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, featuring the soft-spoken and infinitely patient Fred Rogers, premiered in 1968. It may have seemed like just another children’s series at the time, with the host interacting with puppets and singing songs, but over time it has come to be appreciated as an almost transcendent vehicle for children to get in touch with their emotions.

The show went off the air in 2001, and Fred Rogers died in 2003, but his kind spirit lives on in a well-received documentary, a feature film starring Tom Hanks and the PBS Kids series Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood.

• Big Bird & friends: seeing people like you on screen. Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969, the same year we landed on the moon, represented a “giant leap” for children’s television. Creators Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett adhered to a rigorous curriculum instead of selecting lessons based on what felt right.

They enlisted the brilliant puppeteer Jim Henson to create unforgettable characters that interacted with live actors. In addition, they conscientiously built a community that its intended audience would recognize as their own.

In his foreword to David Kamp’s Sunny Days: The Children’s Television That Changed America, published in 2020, drummer, bandleader and writer Questlove acknowledges: “There were plenty of cities on other shows
. But none of these cities were familiar to me the way that Sesame Street was. It was urban, maybe the most urban show on the air. On Sesame Street, ‘urban’ meant what it is supposed to mean: a cityscape filled with different kinds of people, as well as busy stoops and storefronts where those people went to talk and joke and eat and sing. This was a community in the literal sense, which, to us kids watching at home all over America, became a community in the figurative sense.”

Nickelodeon, which was founded by the educator Geraldine Laybourne in 1979, became the first children’s channel on cable television. It took some vital lessons from Sesame Street and added dimensions and characters of its own, notably the bilingual Dora the Explorer, who debuted in 1999.

Levine, who was previously Founding Director of the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop, told me, “Sesame set the stage for a plethora of innovation in the children’s media space. They built the mold, and companies like Nickelodeon and its offshoot Noggin, pioneered important new projects like talking back at the TV so that children could imagine playing along with their beloved characters.”

• Home video and the Internet: seeing what you want, when you want. While innovations in content have continued since Sesame Street, the big story of the past few decades is the technological innovations that seem to hand control to children and their adults.

First, VCRs made the content “on demand”; then DVDs and video games made it portable; and now YouTube and other streaming services allow children to instantly conjure virtually any favorite character, song or lesson in the back seat of the car. Along the way, television, or video elements became part of a more interactive multimedia landscape.

The advent of touch screens, Levine acknowledges, is both a boon and a burden – enabling new levels of interactivity (including games) but also raising the expectation in young children that everything should be tappable (even books). The web’s power and risks have prompted organizations like and publications like which Levine co-authored with Lisa Guernsey, to help parents make better choices.

• Seeing people like you in history. For Levine and his colleagues at Noggin, the next stage for young audiences has arisen in response to both the COVID-19 pandemic, which is keeping families at home; and the national reckoning with the legacy of racism.

A new music video series, Rhymes Through Times, celebrates historical African American leaders, starting with Ruby Bridges and Thurgood Marshall. Informally known as “Hamilton for Preschoolers,” the series is a collaboration with Christopher Jackson (the original George Washington in Hamilton) and Lion Forge Animation (Hair Love).

An upcoming project called “Big Heart” will tap musical talent including rapper Aloe Blacc to tackle broader social-emotional lessons, which Levine says should be part of the national conversation around learning loss.

“Our families live in an era of transformational crisis and opportunity,” says Levine. “Certainly, new media forms are evolving every day to help us remain productive, connected and entertained. But none of this tech power will make our children’s lives better unless it is deployed to strengthen the power of human relationships. The legacy of pioneers such as Sesame Street, Fred Rogers and Nickelodeon is that they all promoted a kinder citizenry and a shared future for all children. That’s needed now more than ever.”

Fortnite and Minecraft posed a bit more of a challenge, but, says Nihla Sikkander, who helps shepherd this remarkable program, one child’s request for a TikTok-themed birthday threw her for a loop.

“My initial response was, ‘I have no idea what a TikTok-themed party might look like,” says Sikkander.

She needn’t have worried. One thing Sikkander has learned in working with the JSB volunteers is that they invariably rise to the occasion.

“I asked one of our volunteers if she had any idea how to do a TikTok-themed birthday and she said, ‘Of course! I have teenagers. This will be our weekend project.’” If you had seen what they came up with for this child — it was simply awesome.

“The child who received the party boxes and gifts actually was in tears. She said, ‘It’s so wonderful that they thought of me. They actually thought of me.’”

The children JSB serves aren’t necessarily accustomed to such attention or such bounty.

Sikkander’s aunt, Fazana Saleem-Ismail, started a decade ago to make sure at least some of the area’s homeless children were celebrated on their special day and knew that indeed, someone was thinking of them. Saleem-Ismail had been working as a program officer at the Robin Hood Foundation in New York when she visited a soup kitchen as part of a site visit. The director told her that when a child had a birthday, the staff would try to make the child feel special by singing “Happy Birthday” to them. The idea of a child celebrating a birthday in that way haunted her for years.

When Saleem-Ismail became a mother a few years later and started creating themed birthday parties for her daughter and saw how thrilled her own little child was, she realized what she was destined to do. She would create personalized birthday for homeless children.

She used her children’s nicknames — Jazzy and Sun — to name the new endeavor and reached out to St. Catherine’s Center for Children to see if they would be interested in her hosting parties for the children living at their shelter. Friends donated funds, friends of friends donated cakes and Jazzy Sun Birthdays was born. Since its inception in 2011, JSB has celebrated hundreds of birthdays, now has more than 1,700 volunteers and works with three agencies in the Capital Region — St. Catherine’s, City Mission of Schenectady and Peter Young: Housing, Industries and Treatment — to serve children in their shelters. St. Catherine’s Center for Children is JSB’s fiscal sponsor.

In June, the JSB community was heartbroken to mourn Fazana Saleem-Ismail’s death at the age of 47 after a six-month battle with stomach cancer. She was beloved, and her absence left a chasm in the heart of the community she created.

Sikkander, Saleem-Ismail’s niece, and Afsaan Saleem, Saleem-Ismail’s brother knew JSB needed to go on and they realized that they had to take on Saleem-Ismail’s legacy. Sikkander and Saleem, are now stewards of the big-hearted program begun nearly a decade ago.

“I had seen her develop the idea, work really hard and be resilient even though there were many, many challenges,” Sikkander said. “So, I said, ‘OK. I’m going to take it on and build on her vision.’”

What Sikkander and Saleem saw that inspired them to continue—even beyond the joy each birthday brought to the children — was the incredible connections JSB creates: the story of Jazzy Sun Birthdays is a story of community. Individual families throw birthday parties, community groups such as the Kiwanis Club, Girl Scouts troops, a high school service club or faith-based organization jump in and take care of all aspects of giving each child their own special day. Sometimes volunteers will ask on their birthdays if, instead of receiving personal gifts, their friends and family would donate gifts in their name to JSB.

“Once we had 10 birthdays at one shelter, so we needed 10 separate cakes. Some of our volunteers said, ‘Hey, I heard you need 10 birthday cakes. We’ll take care of that.”

“This summer, one of our shelters let us know that a mom and her 3-year-old son had just arrived. The little boy was turning 4 that day and needed a reason to smile. He had been begging his mother for an ice cream cake. The shelter apologized for the short notice and asked if there was any way to assist.”

Of course, there was a way. Not only was there an ice cream cake, there was a bag full of gifts just right for a 4-year-old. Over the years, Saleem-Ismail had saved every item she hadn’t used, so she had boxes of toys, wrapping paper, goody bags and cards handy for just such an occasion.

In fact, the plethora of presents and party goods created another conundrum for Jazzy Sun Birthdays — and another opportunity for a volunteer’s generosity to shine. After her aunt’s passing, Sikkander and Saleem were faced with the need to move all of those party supplies out of Saleem-Ismail’s basement. They asked the volunteers for suggestions of storage facilities and one connected JSB with Pinnacle Storage Solutions, which her family owned. Not only did her family donate a large, climate-controlled storage unit, they told JSB that donors could send presents directly to the facility and they would be personally responsible for making sure the gifts go into JSB’s storage unit.

The pandemic has had forced JSB to alter the format of its celebrations, as it has the rest of the country. As before, each shelter asks the children to fill out a questionnaire listing their interests and the volunteers read the information to see how best to plan a party that will connect with those interests. JSB maintains an Amazon wish list of gifts the children have requested and posts a call-out on the program’s Facebook page so volunteers can check to see what’s needed.

Before the pandemic, volunteers would go to the shelter themselves and play games, face-paint and celebrate with the children and their friends at the shelter. Now, they create parties-in-a-box that contain goody bags for each child expected to be present, birthday dĂ©cor, plates and eating utensils, juice boxes or bottles of juice and a card or note with birthday wishes. The volunteers have carte blanche to create the boxes however they wish — and many really throw themselves into it. They personally take the party boxes and cakes to the shelters and that, too, is a way that connections are strengthened.

“The volunteers go to the shelters and they get the experience that this is who they are serving,” Sikkander says. “When a family volunteers, the children get involved in putting together party boxes and develop a real sense of community service. Jazzy Sun offers an easy, fun way to volunteer — and the idea of serving our community is something that can start at any age.”

Since taking over responsibility for JSB, Sikkander and Saleem have created an advisory board to assist the organization in growing Saleem-Ismail’s vision. So far in November, the number of birthday boys and girls in the shelters has doubled — perhaps a harbinger of things to come as the economy and the pandemic continue to devastate working families. Eventually, they would like to expand JSB to reach children in low-income families who might be staying just ahead of homelessness but still have little to spend on celebrations for their kids.

Sikkander says she hopes that JSB can inspire others to undertake similar projects in their own communities and has offered to share JSB’s experience with anyone who wants to replicate it. (Just go to the and send them a message.)

The organization now can be said to have international reach. Saleem-Ismail, Saleem and Sikkander have roots in Sri Lanka and when a shelter for girls there heard about the work JSB does, they made birthday cards to send to children in the U.S. shelters.

“The children in Sri Lanka wanted to show the children here who may be facing similar circumstances that it is possible to hope and believe and know happiness is possible.”

That’s a lesson Sikkander has learned at a newer, deeper level as well.

“My aunt left this incredible legacy and when we made the decision to keep it going, we didn’t realize that being able to do this work was a path through our grief. This community of volunteers is truly wonderful. We are so grateful to her for bringing all of us together.”

The Campaign

Four-and-a-half weeks.
23,000 hand-written signatures.
A raging global pandemic.

This was the challenge in June put before community organizers in Multnomah County, Oregon (a region of 800,000 residents centered around Portland) seeking to get their universal preschool measure on November’s ballot.

They got over 32,000 signatures.

The Preschool For All campaign (a merger of two distinct efforts, one originally known as Preschool For All, the other known as Universal Preschool NOW, or ) is a game-changer when it comes to how communities in the United States should think about running early care and education efforts. As someone who is more skeptical than most about universal pre-K (the product often relative to the promises), I am thrilled by this innovative, next-generation plan. It should become the standard against which all other universal pre-K campaigns are judged.

How did they do it? The lessons can be summed up in three interconnected buckets: an incredibly strong, bold plan; a high degree of community involvement and community organizing mastery; and thoughtful, targeted messaging.

The Strength of the Plan

The is bold. Funded by a progressive income tax increase only on those making over $125,000 a year (if filing singly) or $200,000 (if filing jointly), the measure stands to raise $133 million in 2021, phasing up from there to bring in $200 million annually starting in 2026.

Indeed, the fact that the Multnomah plan raises so much money is not merely impressive for the number of zeroes. The revenue powers aspects of the plan which promise big impacts and have made it so attractive to voters. It is truly universal, offering six hours a day of free care and education to every 3- and 4-year-old (with four extra hours of before- and after-care, free for both lower-income and many middle-income residents), all while raising educator wages to $18 an hour and providing quality supports. It doesn’t feel like a Band-Aid, it feels like a solution.

The universality is also worth zooming in on, as the organizers had to wrestle with the age-old question of targeted vs. universal provision (this was one of the main points of merger negotiation between the two efforts). UPNOW! organizer Emily von W. Gilbert said in an interview, “it was really important to build something that was universal because it places the stake with everybody, so that you can’t just whittle away at it when nobody’s looking anymore.” Gilbert added that if Oregon’s state pre-K program kept getting funded at its historical level of incremental increases, “today’s preschoolers are going to be dead by the time we approach universality.”

To vet the plan, economists and other policy experts were brought in early; at this juncture, the plan has been , including no less an authority than Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz. As Willamette Week reports: “In their [ballot] argument, the economists say tuition-free preschool programs ‘are cost-effective, since all children gain and children from less advantaged families gain the most and gain more than in programs targeting only children from families with low incomes.’ They say such programs can reduce poverty and racial disparities, benefiting marginalized communities the most, and provide living wages for teachers.”

Organizing Skill + Coalition Building = Success

As mentioned, the Preschool For All campaign is actually a merger of two separate efforts. The Preschool For All Taskforce, led at its core by a Parent Accountability Council made up of roughly 40 parents of color, pursued a multi-year, community-led effort to design the bones of the plan (much more on that endeavor in the second part of this story). A County Commissioner then came on board as a champion who legislatively moved forward a ballot measure.

Meanwhile, UPNOW!, led by community organizers, pursued the ballot signatures and the more ambitious aspects of the plan that were adopted in the merger. The ability to gather over 32,000 signatures in such a short time, under brutal conditions, while crowdsourcing all of their funding, speaks to the fact that UPNOW! was stepping forward not with the domain-specific knowledge of early childhood advocates, but with mastery over community organizing strategies and tactics.

The UPNOW! organizing strategy had three main prongs: organizing parents, providers and practitioners. But their success spread out even beyond these most impacted stakeholders. By using strong, simple messaging (more on this below) and the power of networking, organizers ended up recruiting everyone from healthcare workers to yoga teachers. In the end, they had 500 volunteers fanning out to gather signatures, many of whom had deep activist networks from the summer’s racial justice protests and other grassroots organizing efforts.

Between the Preschool For All Taskforce and UPNOW!, the campaign has assembled a truly impressive , combining the grassroots and the grasstops. Endorsers include not only local officials, but Oregon Governor Kate Brown and two area congresspeople. Although contexts differ, it’s hard not to contrast the broad-based appeal of the Multnomah campaign with a failed preschool campaign like last year’s sales tax attempt in Kansas City which was among would-be supporters.

The Power of Strong Messaging

While early childhood advocates have a tendency to want to talk about preschool for its (tremendous!) early learning benefits, the campaign wisely targeted messages even for those who are less activated by brain development arguments. Organizers touched on intersecting inequities that let them get even non-parents deeply engaged; in a sense, there was an entry point for everyone. In fact, the entry point for UPNOW! organizers was not even so much about pre-K at the beginning, but instead about finding a vector to attack income inequality.

Tailored messaging included feminist arguments around the impact on working mothers; anti-poverty arguments around the fact that preschool costs were the equivalent of rent costs; worker’s rights arguments around helping early childhood educators realize a living wage; and even criminal justice arguments, as the plan bans the suspension or expulsion of preschool children, often the first step on the school-to-prison pipeline.

Gilbert explained that the messaging was important because “you have to be attentive to what grabs people. The more technocratic and wonky you get, you lose people. You have to be able to explain things very simply. Many non-parents don’t understand that preschool costs money, [so] you have to explain it like ‘isn’t it weird that you have to pay for preschool and early childhood education until Kindergarten where you can just drop off your kids? Why is that? Why can’t we have it start earlier?”

The campaign also got creative. A local bakery, , started offering a “universal preschool cookie” ($4 apiece, $2 of which went to the campaign), which were so popular .

Conclusion

There might be a temptation to hand-wave this campaign away as an artifact of kooky liberal Portland. Resist that temptation. The bones of what the merged campaign has done are applicable anywhere:

• a truly community-based development process;
• a bold, ambitious plan;
• leveraging serious community organizing and political campaign know-how;
• development of a super-coalition spanning nearly every sector of society;
• tailoring a multitude of messages for different audiences;
• and just plain doggedness in the face of obstacles.

They have also managed to elevate the issue of early care and education and build enormous public awareness in ways that will enable them to pursue other early childhood measures in the future, such as one focused on infants and toddlers. A rural community in a red state may not be primed to raise hundreds of millions of dollars, but it can certainly use these lessons to generate a big impact.

It remains to be seen if voters will approve the measure on November 3rd, but signs are encouraging. If Multnomah’s Preschool For All becomes a reality (and, honestly, even if it fails), it has broken new, fruitful ground. We shouldn’t go back.

Read part two here.

Yet building an integrated system of health, education and family engagement programs and services to support the youngest learners is a tall order. No matter how capable and well intentioned these leaders are, they are disconnected from opportunities to learn from each other. As a result, they have to, in effect, reinvent the wheel.

“We need to weave a system of connectivity,” says Diana Mendley Rauner, president of the . As the importance of early childhood development to their health, civic and economic objectives becomes more widely recognized, public officials and their staffs can learn from how other communities are tackling similar issues.

“We’re seeing an increase in the number of communities taking a systematic approach,” Rauner says. “It’s happening organically across the country, but there’s still not enough progress. There’s too much fragmentation in our field.”

Exchange, Collaborate, Build: How Peer Learning Drives Community Success

To jump-start systems-based solutions, a group of 33 national network and community leaders gathered last year at Wingspread—a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed house-turned-conference-center in Racine, Wisconsin—and launched Harnessing Community Momentum.

“It was like a barn raising,” says Joan Lombardi, who served, from 2009 to 2011, as the first Deputy Assistant Secretary for Early Childhood Development in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. “We came together for the common good.”

Harnessing Community Momentum’s first manifestation is the . The online community was eagerly taken up as the pandemic spread and practitioners sought answers and reassurance. As early childhood development programs consider options for reopening in the fall, conversations are shifting to solutions for protecting the health of children and the workforce that serves them. More broadly, conversations are addressing how to “build back better” and realize an early childhood system that is equitable and sustainable.

that teachers improve their classroom performance when they learn from peers. As Harnessing Community Momentum shows, the same goes for early childhood leaders charged with improving the social factors that optimize early childhood development.

Colleen Murphy of the Ounce says that new features and functionality are in the works for the ECConnector. “Navigators from different organizations will be available to facilitate relationships and guide them to experts and similarly situated peers,” she adds. “They will check in later to find out how everything went.” That way, the next community facing a similar challenge will know what did and didn’t work.

For Michelle Larva, Project Manager, of the Early Learning Alliance in Tarrant County, Texas, ECConnector represents an opportunity for meaningful collaboration without expensive (and, these days, impossible) travel. “We are in the midst of developing a strategy for sustainable funding for early childhood systems in our community,” she says, “and I value the experience of colleagues across the country who are addressing similar issues.”

A trip through the ECConnector, which has quickly grown to over 1,200 members, reveals leaders exchanging ideas and encouragement. For example, a disparate group has been weighing in on strategies for coordinating COVID responses between public health and child care systems.

• In Vermont, regional public health nurses operate a call line for child care providers to answer questions.
• New Mexico’s maternal and child health director collaborated with the state’s new to develop guidance for child care programs and answer questions from child care providers and home visitors.
• The Iowa Child Care Resource & Referral Network has been working closely with Healthy Child Care Iowa nurse consultants to provide timely information to child care providers.

The Wingspread conversation was intense and candid. Some participants posited that an abundance of valuable knowledge is in the heads of experienced practitioners rather than at the fingertips of those who could use it right now. How do you capture their experiential insights? Others saw a problem that might seem irreconcilable with the first—too much information. The truth is, a yields more than 5 million results.

The Wingspread attendees called on a way to curate the available information and amplify the most relevant expertise. Still others expressed a need for a way that communities could informally connect and share their experiences.

“We need to get behind local efforts,” Lombardi says. “We need to champion them and communicate them to local, state and federal policy makers.”

As a pediatrician and social epidemiologist at Boston Medical Center and Director of the , Dr. Renee Boynton-Jarrett viewed her participation at the Wingspread conference as a step toward becoming more connected to a field she recognized as vital but hadn’t been able to plug into. “The way the health care sector is set up, we don’t always make the best partners,” she says. She sees a need for a “multi-prong strategy” connecting experts with local community leaders with policy makers.

After much discussion, the Wingspread conference arrived at three goals for Harnessing Community Momentum:

1. Fostering new ways of working collaboratively and collectively where a range of organizations working together can co-create and co-manage progress toward common priorities that no one organization can accomplish alone.
2. Advancing knowledge sharing and dynamic idea generation across communities and networks to accelerate action in communities and at the local, state and national levels.
3. Building the aggregate evidence to tell a powerful story of progress and impact of the local community movement, ultimately making the case for supportive public policy and expanded support.

So far, over 40 community and organizational leaders have participated in an iterative design process with experts in human-centered design and other fields. Lombardi celebrates the progress they’ve made as a movement without a leader. The leadership is the partnership.

Ounce of Prevention Fund’s Rauner notes that, due to the Coronavirus pandemic and other factors, the early childhood system is changing rapidly. “Important decisions are being made,” she says, “This is a critical moment for building back and expanding the reach of an early childhood system that is better and more equitable.”

In other words, in Larva’s stark summary of the present moment: How do we as a society nurture every single one of our children?

They are, however, little sponges, rapidly soaking up the attitudes and emotional responses they encounter. By the time they are toddling and talking, they have begun to form opinions and responses of their own — again, before they even have words to articulate their thoughts. By the time they are 2, they have begun to internalize racial bias.

“Racial attitudes are formed not only by what children hear, but by actions and reactions of those around them,” DougĂ© says. “You may never say to your child, ‘I think such-and-such about race,’ but your child will absorb what you think and feel.”

As health services director of Maryland’s Howard County Health Department, DougĂ© coauthored a policy statement for the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) journal Pediatrics on the . Although progress has been made in the U.S. toward racial equality and equity, she writes, racism’s ongoing negative impact on the health and well-being of the nation’s children is clear. Failure to address racism will continue to undermine health equity for all of our children and families. The good news, she says, is that this moment represents an unprecedented opportunity to shape the future in powerful ways, for our children and for ourselves.

Just as we vaccinate our children early in their lives against polio and other devastating diseases, so we can inoculate our children against racial bias and provide them with lifelong tools to effectively address the biases they encounter. In the process, we can enrich our own lives.

As with all cultural change, the starting place is with ourselves, DougĂ© says. Confronting our biases and fears, examining our attitudes and consciously creating a wide, culturally diverse social network can provide the first steps toward profound social change. Make some new friends and take your babies with you. Your interest, kindness and compassion will model how you want your children to respond to people’s differences without your ever saying a word.

According to two , there’s even more to it than that. According to professor Kang Lee, these studies show that babies begin to show racial preferences by the time they 6 to 9 months old in favor or members of their own race and against those of other races. The cause, he says, appears to be a lack of exposure to other races. Prior studies from other labs indicate that more than 90% of infants only interact with people of their own race, which provides little to no experience with other-race individuals. Early exposure may help hard-wire awareness of “otherness” in positive ways.

When it’s time to talk about race, DougĂ© wants you to know it’s OK. It isn’t racist to address the issue or answer and anticipate questions your child may have — particularly in this time when every media source is insistently broadcasting stories of race. When your child notices differences, there’s no need to self-consciously shush them: consider it a teaching moment, and one in which similarities as well as differences can be underscored. If you don’t talk to them about race, they could begin to fill in the blanks with the biases of the world outside your home.

“It’s important that you have these conversations in ways that are developmentally appropriate,” she says. “When you teach your kids the importance of washing hands to prevent the spread of disease, you don’t go into the whole epidemiologic, scientific background. It’s the same way with race. There is nothing wrong with acknowledging that people have different hair colors, eye colors and skin colors, and doing that when children are very young.”

“There’s no shame to noticing. You don’t want to shame anyone — we just want to start from very young being conscious of how we create the narrative about how people are and how they can be.”

One tip DougĂ© and Dr. Ashaunta Anderson, who cowrote “” as an AAP resource for parents, offer is when your preschooler notices and points out differences in the people around you in the grocery store or park, hold your arm against theirs to show the differences in skin tone even within your own family. Comparing and commenting about how our wonderful differences are will go much farther than trying to distract or shush a child who has noticed that people don’t all look the same. Or, if they say something biased, ask how they know that and gently correct the mistaken belief.

For most of our children, day care and school are the two places second to family where racial attitudes are learned. Though the coronavirus pandemic has limited many children’s exposure to other children, we won’t all be staying at home forever and BrugĂ© says it’s extremely important for parents and caregivers to be conscious, aware and involved when it comes to what’s happening in their school and group situations.

According to a , racial profiling of our children begins almost as soon as children enter preschool. Black children represent 18% of preschool enrollment but 48% of children receiving more than one out-of-school suspension. We are talking about 4-year-olds.

“There’s a role for parents to play in terms of making sure that the environment is supportive of all kids and reaching out to teachers, the board of education, whomever they need to get involved,” she says. “Beginning from an early age, parents can educate their children to speak up about things they see that are unfair or wrong. Depending on the age of the child, a parent might need to step in and say, ‘What you said there is probably not the nicest thing to say,’ when they observe stereotyping or bias. Again, this models effective behavior even starting at a very young age.

“There are always opportunities to teach our children to not just stand by but to actually help to make a difference when they can. If they’re too young or uncomfortable to intervene themselves, we can teach them to tell their teacher or another adult.”

Dougé says she is encouraged by the massive energy and awareness behind the Black Lives Matter protests that continue to take place throughout the country and particularly the participation of people who previously might not have thought that racism directly affected them.

“This is really an ‘all-and-everyone’ situation now,” she says. “It’s not like, ‘Oh, the Black people have it,’ because that’s not how change happens. Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Yes, we have the historical figure, Martin Luther King, Jr., and all the other Black people in that movement. But if you look at the March on Washington, many of the individuals were not Black. They were white Americans. There’s been a long history of white Americans taking up the cause of justice. And when we’re talking about women’s rights and suffrage, men also took part in that cause.”

“To move this country forward, it isn’t just the marginalized people who make that change. It’s all of us working together and coming in to help,” she says. “I know confronting all of this is uncomfortable, but it’s time to have these conversations and do this work.”

Starting with our babies and our own circle of connections.

RESOURCES

• Online module: (Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences)
• : The American Academy of Pediatrics Parenting Website
• “,” by Peggy McIntosh (Peace and Freedom Magazine, July/August, 1989). 
• (TEDEd)
• (NPR)

Sabra Bell remembers what it was like to be pregnant and low on funds. “Extra cash would have been useful,” she says. “I would have paid off my debts and bought a nice stroller, crib, breast pump, baby clothes and more.”

Today, Bell and other mothers are drawing on their personal experience in their work as researchers on the Abundant Birth Project, an ambitious pilot seeking to reduce the incidence of premature birth in San Francisco.

Starting in 2021, the program will distribute a monthly income supplement of $1,000-$1,500 per month to 100 low-income black and Pacific Islander pregnant women. Payments will continue for the duration of a woman’s pregnancy and then for the first two months of the baby’s life.

Kara Dukakis, an early childhood development senior program officer at , which is one of the pilot’s funders, champions the Abundant Birth Project for the way it explicitly acknowledges racism as a factor in these women’s lives. “An incredibly important part of the pilot is that women of color are hired to be the researchers,” she says. “Because they have lived the experience, they can truly empathize with the women the project supports.”

Maile Chand, another researcher who has “been there” herself, adds, “Not only will this financial opportunity help San Francisco black and Pacific Islander families better provide for their children, but it will also transform the emotional and physical state mothers are in going into their birth.”

The Science Behind the Project

The Abundant Birth Project is grounded in both science and respect for moms. Thanks to advances in medical science, premature babies have a far greater chance to survive and thrive than ever before, but it’s still ideal for a pregnancy to last 40 weeks, or close to it. Cognitive deficits and physical disabilities frequently accompany preterm births, and black women give birth prematurely, as white women.

“The strain of ongoing financial insecurity,” says Dr. Zea Malawa, director of Expecting Justice, “contributes to chronic stress and is associated with premature birth. Although San Francisco has programs to address poverty, they are not enough to close the gaps. The high rates of preterm birth experienced by the black and Pacific Islander community require a more urgent and upstream intervention.”

The Abundant Birth Project builds on of Jackson, Mississippi, which distributed $1,000 monthly for 12 months to 20 women. , was found to help women to improve their nutrition, prepare for baby and engage in self-care to moderate the effect of stressful life events. Reduced incidence of low-birth-weight infants and pre-term birth also resulted.

Free Money? What’s the Catch?

There is no catch.

Unlike conditional cash transfer programs, which distribute money only when subjects adhere to certain behaviors (for example, attending school or visiting the doctor), the program commits to awarding stipends without stipulation.

“Most public assistance programs have complicated eligibility requirements,” says Deborah Karasek, a researcher with the at the University of California, San Francisco, which is partnering with on the Abundant Birth Project. “However well intentioned, these requirements often prevent black and Pacific Islander pregnant women from obtaining the resources they need—and they tend to exacerbate mistrust in the system.”

The Abundant Birth Project, in contrast, provides direct, unconditional cash aid—returning to women the power to make their own decisions.

Pregnancy can simultaneously bring great joy and acute stress. Even for mothers with a steady partner, financial resources and robust social networks, this time can be overwhelming, even traumatic. Pregnant women without these assets are susceptible to mental and physical health threats—and this is before a new person suddenly enters the picture, demanding food, attention and medical care.

The Abundant Birth Project won’t make everything right for the moms and babies it touches—but it’s a start.

That’s why, despite government and philanthropic interventions, education for the pre-kindergarten set will take a hard hit in the wake of this crisis. The impact is compounded for children in need, says Betsy Zorio, vice president of U.S. programs and advocacy at Save the Children. “Summer 2020 is shaping up to be the longest summer of their young lives,” she warns.

Save the Children, a national leader in protecting children in emergencies and disasters, operates in more than 200 rural communities in 12 states. Its team of nearly 1,500 early childhood education staffers delivers early childhood education and family engagement programs, as well as training and employing local educators and staff. It has created a signature .

­­­Here are three facets of the organization’s multidimensional COVID-19 response:

1. Nutrition: An alliance with No Kid Hungry is ensuring that school districts, community organizations and government agencies can get nutrition assistance. Simply contact No Kid Hungry at their . Organizations eligible for funding will be contacted directly to submit an application.

2. #SAVEWITHSTORIES: Besides being gifted actors, Jennifer Garner and Amy Adams have stepped up for kids with their Instagram #SAVEWITHSTORIES campaign. It’s a great way to keep learning going while millions of Americans are home. #SAVEWITHSTORIES benefits Save the Children and No Kid Hungry. Here are a few:

• by Matt de la Peña, illustrated by Loren Long. Gorman is the Inaugural Youth Poet Laureate of the United States.
• by Arree Chung
• by Jamie Lee Curtis, illustrated by Laura Cornell
• by Andrea Beaty, illustrated by David Roberts
• , illustrated by Phyllis Harris, along with husband Chris Pratt

3. Maintaining Contact: Schools and libraries are closed. There’s a wealth of resources online, but not everybody can get online. Save the Children’s Lindsey Lockman Dougherty says, “We’re adapting our program models to maintain contact and provide support to families during this pandemic. And when necessary, we’re relying on 20th-century solutions to serve children in rural communities,” such as printing and distributing educational materials within schools’ food distribution programs and calling families directly to share information and resources.

Save the Children also raises awareness about , a platform for boosting the brain-building power of parent-child interactions. Lockman Dougherty, Save the Children’s Vroom specialist, says that while the digital divide always factors into their attempts to help home-bound kids to learn, many families without broadband do have smartphones and appreciate the Vroom app and Vroom by Text. “This is how to turn any moment into a brain-building moment,” she says.

“Coronavirus is going to change all of our lives,” says Zorio. “We are looking at the impacts wide-scale learning loss will have on our nation’s kids, but we also see solutions and the chance to set lasting positive change into motion.”

Disclosure: Vroom was created by Bezos Family Foundation. This story was originally published on Early Learning Nation, which was also an initiative of the Bezos Family Foundation.

Here’s a rundown of some of the most powerful lessons we heard at the summit.

1. Iowa. This is the state with the highest rate of female participation in the workforce. A lot of those workers are moms, and historically low unemployment rates mean that companies are competing for talent. On-site daycare is one way to develop a competitive edge. Josh Laraby, executive director of the Fairfield Economic Development Association, made it clear that early education is simultaneously a workforce issue, a business issue, and a local infrastructure issue. .

2. Idaho. In a state that produces potato chips and computer chips—thanks to Alex Labeau, president of the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry, for that memorable formulation—attracting new businesses is a top priority. Beth Oppenheimer, executive director of the Idaho Association for the Education of Young Children, lamented her state’s lack of public investment in early education but has found that the business community’s engagement in the issue is starting to change the culture and the conversation. .

3. Mississippi. “All data is local,” declared Linda Southward, executive director of the Children’s Foundation of Mississippi. Collecting and presenting relevant local data matters for persuading business leaders. One particular struggle in this state is the number of parents who want to improve their career prospects through post-secondary education. There’s a concerted effort for colleges to collaborate with the business community to accommodate the needs of these student-parents. .

4. Pennsylvania. This state demonstrated that changing hearts and minds depends on introducing policymakers to real people. Cara Moody, a restaurant worker, brought her young son to the summit. While he contentedly played with a model train set, she described a low point in her life when she was crying in the playground because she couldn’t find a viable care option for her night shifts. One of the moms introduced her to Lesely Crawford, owner and director of ABK Learning & Development Center, which operates around the clock, and now she’s able to keep her job and, just as important, the network of colleagues who have stuck with her through thick and thin. .

5. Sesame Street. It’s not a state, it’s a state of mind. Jeanette Betancourt, senior vice president of U.S. social impact at , inspired the summit with her perspective on what it takes to help our kids become smarter, stronger, and kinder. She emphasized the value of the “circle of care”—the network that supports kids beyond their immediate families. According to Betancourt, technology will inevitably be a part of the solution, which is why the Sesame Workshop is constantly researching new platforms, including virtual reality, to engage kids and adults.

Each of the four state chambers of commerce, with the support of their early education partners, will host events across their state to share data and to educate key stakeholders on the impact of child care breakdowns.

For many teachers, however, those moments rarely come. Squeezed by budgets and the constant pressure to teach to district-mandated standards, teachers feel less able to engage with the children freely in ways they know are developmentally appropriate. This is especially true with younger children, who, according to stacks of research going all the way back to John Dewey, need to involve their whole selves — their bodies, their senses, their curiosity and their interactions with others — to learn about the world around them.

Early childhood experts Betsy Grob and Fretta Reitzes have created the in collaboration with to address these issues and provide kindergarten teachers with the support they need to bring their creativity, heart and knowledge to the classroom. Both are Bank Street alumni and are authors with extensive experience teaching and facilitating professional development for early childhood educators. The conference, to be held April 3 and 4 at Bank Street College, is now in its fourth year and provides a rich offering of keynote speakers and workshops led by classroom teachers offering practical, inspirational information ranging from current research to inventive ways to use boxes in the classroom.

Grob and Reitzes intend that the conference not only be useful to the kindergarten teachers who attend but hope that it will serve as a model and inspiration for similar events that can support the unique role kindergarten teachers play in our education system.

“This is about our responsibility that we as educators have to provide the next generation of children who are now 5 years old to be connected to the world in a way that is meaningful for them and to relate to their classroom, their community and the world around them,” Reitzes says. “Our goal is to introduce teachers to different ways of helping children find their voice.”

Reitzes and Grob share a concern that kindergarten classrooms have increasingly begun to look like “watered-down first grade.”

“Teachers are expected to teach ‘reading, writing and arithmetic’ without understanding how 5-year-olds learn,” Betsy Grob says.” Kindergarteners need play and discovery through art and music, taking trips and then processing that as a group. We want teachers and student teachers to be able to understand how they can create a curriculum that makes sense for a 5-year-old.” And still get the job done in meeting standards, she says.

Creating a learner-centered curriculum often involves letting go of preconceived ideas on the way to better ideas, Reitzes and Grob say. They offer the example of a kindergarten in a New York City public school that was required to do a unit on transportation. That’s a fairly broad category, but one class got together and voted to do a study of subways.

The rigid “academic” approach to teaching kindergarten has serious downsides not only for the teachers, who end up thwarted, frustrated and burned-out, but for the children themselves. The teachers know that what they’re doing doesn’t make sense because of what they know about kindergartners, Grob and Reitzes agree. All too often kindergartners don’t want to be in school because it doesn’t fit who they are as learners.”

Along with colleague Julie Diamond, Grob and Reitzes wrote “,” which codifies much of what they have learned from decades as classroom educators and faculty. That combination of practicality and inspiration for creating a rich kindergarten curriculum are at the heart of the conference as well.

“The thing about 5-year-olds is that it’s a very specific developmental stage,” Reitzes says. “They are no longer 4 and they know they’re not, but they’re not 6 yet, not first-graders, and so much of what’s being imposed on them with academic standards is a huge disconnect with where they are developmentally. Standards can be reached in learner-centered classrooms that honor where the child is developmentally.”

Each year the Teaching Kindergarten Conference has had a specific focus. This year, it’s “Sowing the Seeds of Social Justice,” emphasizing the role of teachers as they inspire children to be empathetic members of their community and learn what it means to advocate for fairness. Grob and Reitzes feel strongly that this is timely and essential for teachers and the children they teach.

In addition to offering practical advice and inspiration to attendees, the conference provides the opportunity to build community and connections. Many teachers return each year for renewal in their commitment to “fight the good fight” in bringing developmentally appropriate kindergarten education to their own schools. Just as children need to be part of a community, teachers also need to feel connected and supported in the work they’re doing.

Missouri and its people have been important to me all my life. Missouri has many qualities that make it one of the top states in the United States. Once you see Missouri, you will notice the beauty of the rivers, farm lands, rolling hills and the cities. Missouri is a special place to live because of the people and their values. It is made up of hard-working people who do what’s right. Missouri is also a great place to live and work because of its location. Our state sits in middle of the United States. We are the gateway for transporting people and goods all over this country, as well as overseas. Nonetheless, the cost of living is appealing as well. You can live, work or do business at an affordable price.

2. As the former Sheriff of Polk County, you have strong ties to the criminal justice community. How did your time as Sheriff inform your thinking about the importance of early childhood education and other prevention strategies?

I was a sheriff for 22 years. What I learned the most is that we must be proactive instead of reactive. Bettering our communities starts with taking care of our children. I believe that if our childcare, preschool and early childhood programs improve, criminal activity will decrease in the future. The early childhood programs reach children at critical times in their lives when their brains and social skills are developing. If we focus on the early years, we can help prevent lives that seem to have no purpose and seek criminal activity.

3. Missouri just received a second Preschool Development Grant from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. What did the state learn through the needs assessment required by the initial planning grant and how will it take action to address these needs moving forward?

In the needs assessment work, we heard from primarily three audiences: families, providers of early childhood care and education, and stakeholders of the early childhood care and education system. Families’ primary concerns were about access, availability and affordability. Providers expressed the need for coordination of professional development and practice alignment. Stakeholders see a need to coordinate service and support to families by better coordination between state agencies.

With the Preschool Development Grant B-5 Renewal, we are looking at opportunities to coordinate enrollment and referral systems at a regional point for families. We will also work to include professionals working in home visiting programs in Missouri’s professional development registry and calendar system, building towards one professional development system for all early childhood professionals. Our state child-serving agencies will also be enhancing data systems to identify and provide more efficient and effective services.

4. You recently seated a Child Care Working Group to explore ways to ensure quality and safety within the child care settings. How is the state working with preschool providers to ensure all Missouri children get off to great start?

Missouri preschool providers gave valuable stakeholder input to the Child Care Working Group. The child care working group made recommendations to include changes to child care licensing – removing outdated or unnecessary requirements, ensuring transparency by incorporating policies into rule and revising child care staff training requirements. The working group also enhanced interagency collaboration, resulting in more immediate responses to safety needs within our early childhood care and education programs.

There are a number of providers voluntarily participating in Missouri’s Quality Assurance Report pilot, which is Missouri’s version of a Quality Rating and Improvement System. This pilot offers an opportunity for providers to receive feedback on their program quality. It also provides them with quality improvement strategies to support continuous quality improvement.

Missouri also worked closely with preschool providers to update the State’s Early Childhood Strategic Plan following the PDG B-5 needs assessment. Under this updated plan, Missouri will begin a multi-year effort to establish and support a coordinated and aligned comprehensive system of early learning and care. Missouri’s child serving agencies are on a mission to provide every Missouri family with opportunities to raise children that are safe, healthy and ready to learn.

5. You have six grandchildren. What have you learned as a father and grandfather about the importance of the earliest years of life?

The first few years of a child’s life are extremely important. From pregnancy through the first five years of life, the environment, the relationships, the health and the learning children are exposed to shapes them for years to come.

What is The Hunt Institute’s goal for compiling and releasing these state data narratives?

At The Hunt Institute, we work with senior-level state elected leaders on issues of education policy, so we’re always looking for opportunities to help this audience make data-driven decisions. After nearly 20 years as a nonpartisan leader in K-12 education policy and political leadership, the Institute has evolved to broaden its policy focus to encompass the full continuum, from prenatal care and early childhood to postsecondary education and the workforce.

We believe the best public policy is grounded on data, but when it comes to early childhood policy, this can be a challenge because it’s so multidimensional that important information is sometimes spread across many reporting sources.

Every year there are important reports that focus on child well-being and demographic data, for example, and others that do a great job of zeroing in on prekindergarten enrollment or child care workforce data, but surprisingly few places where all of the pertinent early childhood policy data is pulled together into a single resource. That’s what we attempted to do with our State Early Childhood Data Narratives when they were first released in 2018: create a one-stop shop for policymakers.

The recently released 2020 Narratives reports contain real-time updates to the data, a disaggregated look at key data points by race and ethnicity to help inform equity conversations, and new estimates of access to Child Care and Development Fund subsidies and Early Head Start by infants and toddlers.

What are your plans for presenting your findings to decision makers?

We use these data narratives extensively throughout the year as we work with elected leaders, whether in the context of a state legislative retreat, our annual Early Childhood Leadership Summit, or in support of our Hunt-Kean Leadership Fellows. We don’t want to see these narratives limited to our internal use alone. The narratives from all 50 state and the District of Columbia are available to the public so we hope they’ll continue to be used widely by educators, philanthropy, the advocacy community, journalists and anyone else who might find them helpful.

How do you hope activists, policymakers and academics will use this information?

At The Hunt Institute, our work is both nonpartisan and non-advocate in the sense that we don’t direct elected leaders toward any specific policy agenda. But ultimately, we hope that policymakers will take advantage of this resource to make things better for the young children and families of their states.

It’s our hope that regardless of your role or rationale for seeking the narratives, you’ll find them useful, thoughtfully curated and carefully sourced.

Did the info for any particular states especially surprise you?

Yes and no, really. Demographically, the data bears out a lot of things that are pretty well established. States that have long struggled with generational poverty, for example, tend to reflect that in measures of their child well-being and birth outcomes. That’s not exactly surprising, but it’s critical to keep that data front and center with policymakers.

On the other hand, certain data points really reflect the power of states to effect change through legislative action and administrative policy. It’s not by accident that North Carolina leads the nation in developmental screening rates (58%), for example, or that Washington, D.C. serves 79% of its preschoolers in public prekindergarten programs. These are the results of specific policy decisions and the dedication of the resources necessary to make these things happen. To me these are the kinds of data points that warrant the most attention by policymakers because they speak to what can be done.

What lessons can we draw from comparing states?

I think there is always value in gauging the well-being of children and outcomes being achieved by one’s individual state, both in comparison to regional and “like” states, and with the nation. For policymakers, in particular, we hope the data narratives provide an opportunity to take stock and look at what they might learn from both the policy successes of—and challenges experienced by—other states, with an eye toward improving the lives of children in their care.

Tell us a little about your own story and what drives you to work on these issues.

I began my career in education as a high school science teacher, before becoming a school principal in Chesterfield, Virginia. I served as the deputy secretary of education for the state of Virginia, then secretary of education, under former Governor Bob McDonnell before joining the Hunt Institute, initially as the Director of our Hunt-Kean Leadership Fellows program.

I’ve always believed that education, and early childhood education with a specific policy focus on the years from zero to three, has the power to transform lives for the better–which is why I’ve made early childhood a priority focus area for the Institute as we work with policymakers.

And where’s the best place for play to happen? The short answer is: anywhere outdoors. Of course, there’s nothing like a playground to really get the heart pumping and the synapses snapping.

Drustva Delgadillo prescribes two hours of outdoor playtime daily. Director of strategic partnerships for KaBOOM! the national nonprofit devoted to addressing inequitable access to play spaces, Delgadillo views playgrounds as gathering places for the entire community, whether that means toddlers taking their first steps, teens barreling along an American Ninja Warrior-style adventure course or seniors knitting. She says that to bring about the kind of transformation, community engagement in the design and planning process is necessary to ensure community needs are met, “The quality of age-appropriate outdoor play spaces has to improve.”

“Play is how children learn,” she continues. Among the benefits that are especially relevant for young children, she mentions:

• Improving gross motor skills through climbing and sliding
• Brain-building through parent-child interaction (which I’m pretty sure means the parents have to put their devices away, too)
• Promoting reciprocal play—make-believe is always better with a friend
• Building sensory awareness—for example, through equipment that makes music
• Developing cognitive ability through puzzle manipulation

For Joe Marinucci, CEO of the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, playgrounds matter for economic reasons. “This is part of keeping families downtown,” he says. “It’s part of making a walkable downtown.” Marinucci activated the young professionals organization is his city to address a playground deficit and attracted philanthropic support from the Joseph H. and Ellen B. Thomas Foundation. A design firm called helped to develop a nautical theme to complement the restored steamship in the harbor. Marinucci has tapped , a local nonprofit dedicated to community-centered design, for a subsequent project.

New York City comptroller Scott Stringer conducted an ambitious citywide survey of the playground landscape in the Big Apple, and last year issued the , which found that its playground-per-capita ratio lags behind Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, St. Louis, and 44 other U.S. cities. Affluent neighborhoods have more—and safer—playgrounds than those that need them most.

I spoke to Adam Forman, Stringer’s chief policy and data officer, about New York City’s particular challenges and opportunities. “Cities change,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean they can’t plan.” Given the extensive development across the five boroughs, he continued, planners must “look to existing, publicly owned spaces and repurpose them for the local community.” At the same time, cities of all sizes should be receptive to partnerships that make their playgrounds more inviting. For example, Pampers, the diaper company, donated 600 changing stations, making the city’s parks considerably more baby-friendly.

State of Play calls for a revival of the sort of mid-block playground that came about in the 1960s when Robert F. Kennedy (then a U.S. Senator), architect I. M. Pei, and others put their heads together in the Bed-Stuy Crown Heights neighborhood. Forman notes that in the subsequent half-century, the model has been attempted in other communities, but somewhat haphazardly and “without intention.”

According to Forman, playgrounds don’t necessarily have to be expensive, or overbuilt and fussed over. He mentioned the temporary “adventure playground on Governor’s Island,” made up of cardboard boxes, fabric, markers, string, and tape that periodically arises.

Ever since 1996, when Darell Hammond founded KaBOOM! the organization has prioritized community co-creation. (He stepped down in 2016, and James Siegal is now CEO.) Delgadillo describes inviting kids to draw their dream playground. “They say, ‘We need more slides’ and presto!—a three-slide structure arises.”

The children are the experts, but KaBOOM! has developed a slightly more boring but no less essential quality—23 years of permitting and play infrastructure experience—which makes it an attractive partner for communities that want to put up a playground but lack the administrative or execution capabilities. Delgadillo says the organization is moving toward addressing play space equity by building parks across communities where the need is the greatest.

“That way,” she explains, “It’s more than just a one-off engagement, but has the potential to impact an entire city or system, not to mention the cost savings.” Delgadillo is especially excited about long-term partnerships with NYU Langone Health, the Baltimore City Public Schools (), and the William Penn Foundation and the Playful Learning Landscapes in Philadelphia.

Fundraising is another valuable tool in KaBOOM!’s toolbox. Philanthropy such as the kind that Marinucci found is just one possibility. Delgadillo recommends the Bipartisan Policy Center’s for examples of federal-, state-, and local-level models across government, foundation, and public-private partnerships. “We wait until the dollars are in place before we engage with a community,” she says. “We don’t want to break our promises.”

For other mothers, though, the feelings of sadness, exhaustion and anxiety run much deeper and can overtake the woman’s ability to care for herself or her family. This deep level of stress has a medical diagnosis — postpartum depression (PPD) — and it is treatable: Medical guidelines recommend counseling and possibly antidepressants for all women experiencing it. Untreated, PPD can have serious consequences for both mother and child and can even spiral into psychosis where the mother may be a danger to herself or her baby.

Medical treatment recommendations don’t matter if women suffering PPD never receive that diagnosis, are not able to access care or are constrained from seeking help by culture and family standards — as is particularly the case for African American and low-income mothers.

About one in seven women in the U.S. develops postpartum depression, or about 15% of American women. For Black women, the risk is much greater, says Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, an OB/GYN who is the founder and president of the , dedicated to eliminating racial disparities in birth outcomes and a co-founder of .

“For Black women, the risk is almost twice that — and that’s just the people we know about,” Crear-Perry says.

For Black women dealing with PPD, seeking help can be particularly fraught with cultural and familial expectations, she says. The Strong Black Woman ethos has served African American women for many generations, describing and affirming the fortitude they’ve needed to prevail in the face of countless challenges. When it comes to childbirth, however, that same strength-based identity can isolate a woman just at the moment she needs the most support, authenticity and connection.

Postpartum depression is not caused by something the mother is doing or failing to do. Though the causes are not entirely clear, the mood disorder likely results from a combination of physical and emotional factors. Chemical changes take place in a woman’s brain after childbirth as hormone levels drop drastically. This chemical seesaw creates mood swings that can set everything in the mother’s life off balance. Fragmented sleep is a major contributor to postpartum depression — from getting up every two hours to feed the baby to chemical changes in the mother that keep her brain so revved up sleep becomes impossible. The result can be an unrelenting exhaustion that feeds on itself and creates a dangerous downward spiral.

“There is a lot of shaming and stigma around mental health,” Crear-Perry says, “and a great deal of stigma about being seen as weak for having to ask for help. We’re supposed to be able to take care of our families, to keep it together and keep marching, right?”

Overcoming that internal and external judgment can feel out of reach to depressed mothers, and even their best intentions can be thwarted by knowing implicitly if not explicitly that as a woman of color, the cards are stacked against her. According to the , women in the U.S. are more likely to die from childbirth or other pregnancy-related complications compared to women in other developed countries. The data show that Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related death than their non-Hispanic white counterparts, and research shows that half of these deaths — primarily from hemorrhage and hypertension — are preventable. Pregnant Black women are to be murdered by their intimate partners than white women. And according to the National Institutes of Health, Black mothers are several times more likely to suffer from PPD but less likely to receive treatment and follow-up.

“To be clear,” says Crear-Perry, “those statistics aren’t because of physiological differences. Being Black isn’t a risk factor for illness, death and depression — being exposed to racial bias is the risk factor.”

According to the , this bias disproportionately affects the quality of care mothers receive during childbirth; research has shown that doctors spend less time with Black patients and the care Black mothers receive is less effective. Providers are less likely to believe Black women’s self-reporting of pain and support their breastfeeding, and more likely to ignore their symptoms and dismiss their complaints. Education, socioeconomic status and even fame offer no protection from the bias Black women encounter, demonstrated by high-profile stories such as tennis superstar health catastrophe and the death of Shalon Irving, an epidemiologist at the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

The reports that Black women were less likely than white women to initiate mental health care after delivery and more likely to put off seeking treatment longer after the child’s birth. Early detection and treatment can reduce the negative impacts of the illness, but even in that regard, Black women who started treatment were less likely to receive follow-up or continued care compared with white women who initiated treatment. The study reported that Black women generally preferred psychotherapy over taking antidepressants, but for many, getting psychological services can be nearly impossible because states are not required to offer those benefits in their Medicaid plans.

Some African American women suffer in silence because they are afraid of being reported to child protective services if they admit that they are having trouble caring for their children. There’s reason for worry: Numerous studies have shown that child welfare workers are more likely to deem Black mothers unfit to care for their own children and to recommend that the children be removed from their home. According to Child Welfare, two Texas studies found that while Black families on average tended to be assessed with lower risk scores, they were 20% more likely to have their case opened for services, and 77% more likely to have their children removed instead of being provided with family-based safety services.

“So, if you’re worried about someone taking your baby from you and about not being listened to by your doctors and all these other concerns, that makes you even more depressed, right?” says Crear-Perry. “Especially if you’re substance abusing and need help, you worry about trying to get treatment because they’ll take your baby.” Small wonder that fewer than 15% of African American woman with PPD seek professional care.

Altering this complex situation will take nothing less than a transformation of multiple systems in U.S. society — medical, social and political — and a number of non-profits and professional groups are working toward those ends. In the meantime, Crear-Perry says two of the most effective solutions are deeply rooted both in culture and in history: midwives and .

“Childbirth is not a medical phenomenon,” she says. “It has been medicalized, but prior to it becoming white men anesthetizing you and pulling the baby out with forceps, it was indigenous. Even if the role wasn’t called a ‘doula,’ there was someone to care for the mother and support her throughout her pregnancy and birth.

“When I first heard ‘doula,’ it was from a wealthy friend who was pregnant, and I saw it as a thing for rich people. But when you understand what a doula actually provides, doesn’t everybody deserve that support, that person to watch out for them?”

According to , some research shows that one of the greatest triggers for depression is a significant deviation between what a woman expects or plans and what actually happens — whether an unplanned C-section, complications at delivery, a baby with medical issues or difficulties with breastfeeding—particularly with those mothers who do not have support. Supporting the mother through the anticipated and the unforeseen is the work of the doula; caring for mother in a highly individualized way has always been the work of the midwife. Helping the mother get set up for successful breastfeeding is the work of both.

“For Black mothers,” Crear-Perry says, “midwives and doulas aren’t a luxury, they’re the fix.”