From ECIN's Directors: 2020 -- A year of reflection, renewal and looking ahead
Though it’s been said over and over, 2020 has truly been an unprecedented year for all of us. For ECIN, many of our programs and innovations look very different today than they did in January of 2020. COVID-19 quarantine restrictions required that we re-examine and re-invent how we deliver and evaluate these programs while maintaining the health and safety of the people we care for and for our team.
Both the pandemic and our approaching five-year anniversary gave us an opportunity to turn our gaze inward, gauge success and failure, and begin making plans for where ECIN should be headed as we evolve from our start-up days into our next five years as an organization.
Looking critically at our own activities and into the future of our work became even more important after events in the summer of 2020 affirmed once again what so many families in Washington, D.C., already knew--that racism and oppression continue to disrupt and devalue the lives of children and families, and that much of the trauma and adversity experienced by young children growing up in the nation’s capital is directly related to the long legacy of injustice and violence inflicted upon Black, Brown, and Indigenous People in the United States up to this very day.
These events also reaffirmed ECIN’s ongoing work to be anti-racist and to advance racial equity. The drive to achieve this is ingrained throughout the people on our team and underlies everything we do for children and families in the nation’s capital.
Our mission and vision remain constant: To catalyze system transformation so that all young children in Washington, D.C., have access to equitable opportunity and outcomes, and to reduce disparities in health and education outcomes for young children and their families through innovation, community collaboration, advocacy and policy. Our goals are to:
To protect and enhance parent mental health
To optimize early childhood developmental outcomes
To prepare children for school by age 5
What’s next
As we approach the end of our first five years working together as the Early Childhood Innovation Network, here’s what our next five years’ will focus on:
Expanding Innovations: We aim to advance the evaluation, dissemination and policy and advocacy phases our first round of innovations and launch a second round aimed at advancing early childhood and family wellbeing. Innovations are clustered together based on their objectives:
Cluster A: Integrating multigenerational clinical mental health supports in medical settings
Cluster B: Integrating multigenerational clinical mental health supports in early learning settings
Cluster C: Building mental health knowledge of early learning providers
Cluster D: Leveraging parent leadership and peer support
Expanding training, education and dissemination activities to integrate ECIN’s findings into practice.
Creating a policy lab to advance local and national policies that improve early childhood and family wellbeing
Strengthening ECIN’s infrastructure to maximize efficiency, equity, impact and sustainability
Families as leaders
You’ll also see a renewed focus on dissemination and sustainability—making sure that the programs that work the best are reaching as many people as possible. One major way we hope to create sustainability is by finding innovations that move away from the idea that families are simply clients and participants. Instead, we seek opportunities to engage them as the experts, creators, and ultimately, the leaders that we know they can be to support and empower their peers.
Expanded leadership
Together we continue to serve as co-directors of ECIN. In addition, in the last few months we’ve added some additional directors and managers to bring new perspective to our work over the next five years.
Director of Program Development: Noel Bravo, an experienced project and policy leader in Washington, D.C.
Director of Pediatric Innovation/Medical Director: Nia Bodrick, M.D., a pediatrician at Children’s National Hospital.
Director of Early Learning Practice: Arrealia Gavins, an expert in early childhood care and education
Director of Operations: Lorenzo Nicholson, MBA, who is also the Program Manager, Operations for the Community Mental Health CORE at the Children’s National Child Health Advocacy Institute
Director of Mental Health Innovation: J. Corey Williams, M.D., M.A., a child and adolescent psychiatrist at Medstar Georgetown University Hospital.
We are excited to welcome them all to the ECIN team.
As we noted in June, we are all committed to undoing racism and building a more equitable society. We believe that the path to achieving this lies in the efforts and innovations we are working on, and we hope these ideas will help shape a more just and equitable future for children and families.
Anti-Racism Resources
As a part of our commitment to becoming an anti-racist organization, each edition of this newsletter will share a few educational resources for adults and children that are focused on undoing racism. Additionally, we are regularly updating our racial equity resource list, which can be found here, and will continue to do so.
We encourage you to spend time on a regular basis learning more about both the historical context of racism, and the current experience and impact of racism in today’s world. We also encourage each of you, and especially our White colleagues, to continually learn more about how you can be actively anti-racist and make a personal commitment to action.
Innovation Spotlight: Parent Cafés
Making meaningful connections with people was harder than ever in 2020. But one ECIN innovation—Parent Cafés--have managed to successfully give parents and caregivers in Washington, DC, a virtual way to create connections, take time for self-reflection, and seek support from their peers.
in their own words: read impact stories about our parent cafes on our website.
Before the pandemic, ECIN launched Parent Cafes as physically and emotionally safe spaces where parents and caregivers gathered in person, in small groups, to talk about the challenges and victories in raising families. In recent months, the Parent Cafes have been re-born as a virtual series.
Each themed, virtual Parent Café gives its participants the opportunity for deep self-reflection and learning so they can explore their strengths and create strategies from their own wisdom and experiences to strengthen their families.
“Parent Cafés are an excellent interactive engagement tool to help assist families with strengthening themselves from the inside out,” says Randall Baylor, who leads ECIN’s community engagement programs.
Susan Caleb, the program’s coordinator, adds that once someone enters the virtual meeting space, they take off “the professional hats. We’re all in a learning process, and all in this together.”
In the beginning, Randall or Susan led the sessions, but as the cafés have continued, they’ve transitioned to a model where parents and caregivers help plan them and also lead the conversations.
Each leading parent or caregiver completes a training program to help them learn to encourage conversation and to incorporate themes from the Center for the Study of Social Policy Strengthening Families protective factors. Those five factors: parental resilience, social connections, knowledge of parenting and child development, concrete support in times of need, and social and emotional competence of children, underlie every Parent Café session.
Since September, there have been five virtual Parent Cafés, each focused on a different idea for reflection, with titles such as “Leaf it to me, “The Great Gratitude,” “The Gift of Family,” and “Healing Justices.”
Attendance is limited to keep the discussion feeling intimate and to make sure that everyone who participates can be heard. The small setting also creates opportunities for ECIN’s team to personally follow up with parents and caregivers who need to be connected with community resources. “We want to be that touchpoint for emotional support, but also it’s a success that we can assist in connecting them to concrete support as well,” Randall notes.
The team has faced a host of new challenges this year with restrictions on in-person meetings but has found a virtual model that is working for now. In the immediate future, they hope to identify more ways to reach people who want to participate in the groups but lack the technology to join virtual meetings. Long term, they hope to get back to in-person cafés.
They are also working on ways to share the model widely and make the program sustainable over time. This might include development of a learning hub to train more parents and caregivers on how to plan, set up and lead their own Parent Cafés anywhere in the city.
Ultimately their goal is to keep building on their success at bringing people together. “We’ve been able to create a safe space for people,” Susan says. “We’ve given them the platform to express their sense of exhaustion, frustration and even fears, at a time when making those connections is really difficult.”
Events and Announcements
New Video Series: Parenting in Challenging Times
We’ve added several new videos on our Youtube channel and on the ECIN website for parents and caregivers when times get tough—for example, during a global pandemic.
Check them out, subscribe to our channel and share with others!