Eastside Early Learning Facilitators: Best Starts for Kids Innovation Grant
Having just completed their planning and development phases at the end of April, the Eastside Pathways Early Learning Facilitators project team presented their project alongside the other twelve grant recipients at the King County Best Starts for Kids Innovation Fund gallery walk. The project is a partnership between Eastside Pathways and NISO Programs Promotores.
Alma Gonzalez, Cathy Habib, Sandy Nathan, and Chris Enslein at the King County Best Starts for Kids Innovation Grant gallery walk.
“Our purpose is really two-fold,” says Cathy Habib, Eastside Pathways facilitator and grant fund manager. “We want to co-create an improved system for Latino families on the Eastside to get to know the early learning resources that are available to them, while building their confidence in navigating the school system, reducing stress, and emphasizing the importance of kindergarten readiness. We also want to collect qualitative and quantitative data from the Latino community about their impression of the resources and their experience accessing them. This data will help our Eastside early learning providers improve their systems.”
The team applied for and was awarded the grant last year based on its earlier work with the NISO Promotores Program and conducting a community survey. They’re looking to build grass roots community activists that “serve as the bridge between the Latino community and the early learning resource providers,” says Alma Gonzalez, NISO Programs Director.
The project focuses on the Eastside Latino community, currently making up about 12% of the population in the Bellevue and Lake Washington School Districts. Organizations who provide services to families with young children on the Eastside have sought to build a stronger connection to their services and the Latino community.
Through the Early Learning Facilitators project, the team hopes to help build community trust, increase families’ comfort with the system, empower the community, and improve services and how they are communicated. Ultimately, these factors should help to increase the number of Latino kids meeting early learning markers of kindergarten readiness.
The project grant continues through December of 2020 with feasibility tests and early piloting taking place now through the end of the year, and a full pilot running from January – December 2020.
You can learn more about the Promotores project here and on the NISO Programs website.
You also might enjoy this video focusing on the NISO project from the 2018 Strive Together annual conference in 2018.