Our Overarching Goal
Our child, family, and community goals include:
- Children and families receive services and support to meet universal and identified needs; they are healthy, thriving, and meeting and maintaining their fullest developmental potential.
- Children and families live in safe, stable, healthy, and nurturing families, neighborhoods and communities.
- Children are prioritized and the whole community acts to support their health, safety, learning, and well-being.
- Systems work for families and families are economically stable.
Current Conditions
The Early Childhood believes that it does not have to be this way. Many other states and communities do better. Rochester’s poor national ranking in terms of child poverty and academic performance persists as the systems established to attend to health, education, social services and economic security of children and their families are inadequate. Parents and family members, who are experts in knowing the processes that are working and the areas that need overhaul have been left out of decision-making spaces, which has specifically contributed to these failures.
Building Parent/Family
Partner Power
A key principle and value in our work is authentic and transformative parent/family engagement and leadership, with a focus on racial equity. Our distributed leadership model guarantees parents have a seat at the table, with 50% Parent/Family Partners and 50% System Partners driving the Early Childhood.
The Early Childhood provides Parent/Family Partners with all the tools they need to lead our mission, including training, professional development, and technology.
Collective Impact and
Continuous Improvement
We publicly affirm our commitment to advance systems-level approaches that disrupt structural racism and build racial equity to ensure that children receive what they need to be safe, healthy, and successful.
TAKE PART IN OUR MISSION