03/08/2016 (2) - Laserfiche WebLink

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In the area of building parent capacity increased funding enabled two existing home visiting programs, Healthy Start/Healthy Families ($35K granted), to expand, and one new program, Parents as Teachers ($40K granted), to begin a pilot. With over half the infants in IRC born into poverty and/or to single mothers, one could conservatively estimate that 600 infants each year would benefit from programs that provide effective parenting skills development on how to properly care for their children and engage their developing minds. Yet less than 200 families received this help in 2014. Increased Momentum and Community Coming Together During the 2014/2015 school year, a number of important, separate but related, events occurred that helped our community move forward on understanding and addressing the problems and needs of children in Indian River County. The Needs Assessment provided the data to help understand the current wellbeing of IRC children: Concurrently, The Kindergarten Readiness Collaborative (KRC) conducted its own analysis of the reasons 30-40% of IRC children are not ready for kindergarten. Part of their analysis included visiting other counties in Florida and the specific interventions those communities put in place to address similar issues. For clarity, the KRC is a collaborative of the community coming together (agencies, preschool providers, parents, SDIRC and funders) with a shared vision: All children in IRC are prepared for kindergarten across the five critical domains. 1. Social/emotional 2. Physical health and well-being 3. Cognitive 4. Communication, and 5. Adaptive learning. The KRC produced their Strategic Plan prior to the CSAC June grant allocations. Though separate processes, these two projects had similar conclusions: we must focus on children and their families early in a child's life because the greatest social/emotional and cognitive development happens before a child is five. Of note, several members of the Funder's Forum have privately funded the KRC Strategic Plan as well as staffed its backbone organization in its first year. The United Way (UW) has aligned itself with the Moonshot Moment and KRC goals in its Education Vision Council. The UW has also made important changes in the way they fund: two-year cycles, defined outcome indicators/metrics and the creation of a smaller more flexible grant pool for pilots and partnerships. Similarly, the funding community has gained strength and focus. The Funders Forum came together to fund the CSAC 2015 match. This was after they had completed their grant cycles. They wanted to demonstrate to the Commissioners our collective opinion on how important investment in our community's children is to our donors. The Funders Forum continues to meet, communicate and collaborate. All have worked tirelessly to increase private funds available in 2016 by close to $1million dollars. -15Q.5