What is the Mindful Early Learning Initiative?

The ECIN Mindful Early Learning Initiative (EMELI) promotes mindfulness training opportunities, helps share relevant information, and advocates for policies that bring mindfulness supports to educators, community leaders, mindfulness teachers, and caregivers of young children in areas of Washington, DC, and beyond. The initiative focuses on people who have traditionally had less access to mindfulness and other self-care and wellness resources. To ensure training opportunities and resources are appropriate/relevant, we consider the following:

• Are the trainings/tools/resources based on the culture and context of the people who need them/will use them (culturally grounded)

• Are the trainings/tools/resources focused on healing-centered practices?

• Do the trainings/tools/resources use asset-based language?

• Do the trainings/tools/resources consider the complex and intersectional identities of people within communities, rather than defining groups of people by their perceived problems (liberation based)

This initiative is a collaboration between mindfulness teachers, psychiatrists, psychologists, researchers, and community leaders.

What is the goal of the Mindful Early Learning Initiative?

The ECIN Mindful Learning Initiative (EMELI) seeks to expand and improve accessibility and relevance of social, emotional and mental health supports for people of color (BIPOC identified individuals) living in environments (political, social, economic) where they may be experiencing higher levels of toxic stress and trauma.

Early learning centers in underserved and economically marginalized communities rarely have adequate financial resources to support people they serve. Even when some mental health supports are available, many caregivers don’t and can’t access them due to structural barriers or social stigma. Often cultural, linguistic, or value misalignments with the people providing the support can prevent those who need services or resources from accessing and benefiting from them.

How does the Mindful Early Learning Initiative work?

The Early Childhood Innovation Network, together with the Institute for African American Mindfulness (IAAM), Kozmique Light Meditations, Minds Inc., and families from Educare and AppleTree Early Learning Centers in Washington, DC, partnered to develop a Mindful Parenting curriculum with three levels:

• Level 1: Engages parents and caregivers in developing an individual mindfulness practice, using evidence-based wellness strategies such as mindfulness meditation and psychological education. The practice is specifically designed to bring specific context related to Black and African American cultural wisdom.

• Level 2: Adds the idea of bringing mindfulness perspectives and skills to the parent-child relationship.

• Level 3: Brings community organizing principles and community advocacy activities to the practice to build a sense of community, belonging, and a feeling of confidence for the practitioner to advocate for the needs of their own families and their communities within a larger unjust system.

How will the team know if the Mindful Early Learning Initiative is successful?

The mindful parenting intervention was piloted and tested using a rapid cycle research process. An early evaluation showed that participants reported statistically significant improvements in the ability to experience positive emotions (positive affect) and fewer:

• Sleep disturbances

• Symptoms of anxiety, depression, and trauma

• Feelings of emotional distress (negative affect)

Evaluations of the program are ongoing, with the goal of publishing outcomes and learning from the reports.

How do families lead in the Mindful Early Learning Initiative?

Family leadership is key to this work. The Mindful Early Learning Initiative partners with our families as leaders and co-owners. Families carry profound wisdom and possess the power to heal themselves. Our goal is to help them highlight their strengths and assets as we support them through their challenges. Too often, traditional, non-participatory research enterprises make parents and families feel like research subjects who are defined by specific challenges or existing mental health symptoms like anxiety or depression. This initiative does the opposite.

As a result, the parents and caregivers the team encountered through early learning centers in Washington, DC, have given invaluable leadership and contributions to this collective work.

Does the Mindful Early Learning Initiative speak to ECIN’s racial equity goals?

The Mindful Early Learning Initiative team recognizes and honors the wisdom and brilliance of BIPOC people and welcomes the many different cultural and spiritual practices that have nurtured, sustained, and healed BIPOC people, past and present.

How will the Mindful Early Learning Initiative keep growing?

The Mindful Early Learning Initiative aims to build a pipeline of clinicians, teachers, caregivers and community leaders who offer culturally grounded, healing centered mindfulness support to parents, staff, and other caregivers in early learning settings.  Here are some ideas under development:

• Pilot training for local mindfulness teachers who are Black, Indigenous, or other people of color. In partnership with the Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Certification Program (MMTCP), the training aims to lower barriers to entry for meditation teacher training opportunities. The goal is to have more trained mindfulness teachers of color serving families in underserved areas of Washington, DC. The first class of mindfulness teachers will complete the 2-year-training in early 2023.  

• Create a certificate program in Mindfulness. Part of the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies, a mindfulness certificate program will allow the team to:

  • Share culturally grounded mindfulness applications within clinical care

  • Advance mindfulness teachers’ skills at delivering and facilitating culturally appropriate and healing centered mindfulness

  • Expose community leaders and parents to a robust mindfulness curriculum to support their personal wellbeing.

  Our Mindful Parenting/Mindful Caregiving course is experiential and has significant relevance for peer support workers and other community-based leaders, such as family engagement professionals, early education teachers, home visitors, case managers, community health workers and the staff of community-based organizations.  

• Share lessons learned and expose more communities to the benefits of mindfulness by:

  • Publishing our program results in a forthcoming journal article entitled Mindfulness Intervention with African-American Caregivers at a Head Start Program: An Acceptability and Feasibility Study    

  • Publishing lessons learned from co-creation of Mindful Parenting/Mindful Caregiving in a forthcoming case study about development of the Mindful Parenting intervention/school-based program

  • Connecting with Washington, DC, early learning educators through a series of drop-in mindfulness classes

How does the Mindful Early Learning Initiative make a difference to existing policy and/or existing systems?

High quality and compassionate early learning centers and homes are vital to healthy development for children, families and communities. But often, early learning caregivers, including staff, parents and other family members, in underserved communities of color face high levels of toxic stress and trauma.

The communities served by this initiative have innumerable intrinsic strengths and rich personal and cultural resources that already give rise to a profound resilience, in spite of having endured centuries of structural oppression. Bringing equitable access to culturally appropriate social and emotional support can be a vital enhancement to the mental health and stability of families, their early learning systems, and surrounding communities.

To further share the benefits of these supports, ECIN’s Mindful Early Learning Initiative is exploring potential partnerships with early learning centers as well as behavioral health providers and agencies to identify more opportunities to support mindful early learning activities across the district, including programs such as:

• Thriving Families, Safer Children

• Head Start University Partnership (HSUP) 

• DC Home Visiting Council