Many of you are busy right now working on Early Head Start Expansion and EHS-Child Care Partnership grants. These grants offer tremendous opportunities to positively impact the children and families in your community. The Devereux Center for Resilient Children (DCRC) offers numerous resilience-building opportunities that programs can use to strengthen their Early Head Start Expansion and EHS-Child Care Partnership grants. Early childhood experts know that supporting the resilience and healthy social and emotional development of infants, toddlers and the adults who care for them is essential to creating high quality learning opportunities. For at-risk children and families exposed to risk and trauma, the importance of resilience is critical Below are some of the resilience-building opportunities that DCRC has to offer.
1) Promoting Staff Resilience & Reducing Stress: Partnerships are exciting, but also can bring added stress as partners, staff, and your community work to blend many services and regulations into a program to best meet the needs of infants, toddlers, and their families. DCRC's professional development events inspire, educate, and equip adults to cope through the difficulties of establishing and maintaining healthy partnerships.
2) Building Your Bounce: The Devereux Adult Resilience Survey (DARS) and Adult Resilience Journal: Adults who take the time to reflect and take care of their own health are better prepared to provide high quality care to the infants and toddlers in their program. DCRC's Devereux Adult Resilience Survey (DARS) and Building Your Bounce: Simple Strategies for a Resilient You Adult Resilience Journal provide program directors with simple tools that staff can use to assess their own resilience, while building on everyday activities to take better care of themselves.
3) Creating Resilient Families & Strengthening Family Involvement: Support effective parent involvement by helping families understand the critical role that they play in promoting children's resilience. DCRC's "Socially Strong, Emotionally Secure" workshop helps parents recognize that their ability to provide their child with a strong social and emotional foundation is the key to their child's lifelong success and happiness. Parent workshops can be delivered individually, in a series, in live training or via webinars.
4) Family Guide to Building Resilience: DCRC's For Now and Forever: A Guide for Families of Infants and Toddlers helps parents learn how everyday activities and routines are the perfect opportunities to build their child's resilience. This guide offers simple strategies that can be used to help engage, educate and support families in resilience-building efforts.
5) Resilience-focused Professional Development: The Devereux Center for Resilient Children offers various professional development options all with a focus on resilience. Certified trainers offer live events and webinars. Resilience topics include, but are not limited to,
- Early Head Start and Child Care: Working together to enhance infant and toddler development
- Establishing Quality Social and Emotional Teaching Practices in line with Head Start Performance Standards
- Family Service Worker Training on Resilience: Helping families move toward self-sufficiency
- Adult Resilience: Helping caregivers make the connection between their wellness and their ability to provide high quality care to infants and toddlers
- Creating Resilient Environments where Infants and Toddlers Thrive: Helping staff see every moment of every day as a resilience-building opportunity
6) Screening & Assessing Infant and Toddler Resilience: Appropriate screening and assessment of social and emotional health, approaches to learning, and behavioral concerns is an essential component of Early Head Start. The nationally standardized, strength-based Devereux assessments can be used to involve staff and parents in this process, with electronic access to results and strategies available to support effective planning in both the center and the home settings.
7) Challenging Behavior Train-the-Trainer: With additional children in your care for additional hours and additional weeks each year, challenging behaviors are bound to pose an obstacle at times. Equip your child care, pre-K, and EHS staff with the tools they need to prevent and manage challenging behaviors in toddlers and preschool-aged children.
8) Strengthening Partnerships: Strong partnerships with families and other community agencies require resilient leaders and resilient organizations. Learn how to strengthen all of your partnerships through making resilience a key focus of your organizational structure.
9) Promise Zones and DCRC Team Members: Devereux team members are located in communities across the nation. Ongoing technical assistance support to promote resilience-building efforts may be available if a team member is in your community.
10) Data Analysis: Child assessment data should be analyzed and used to guide planning efforts. If your program needs support around data analysis, DCRC team members are available to help.
To speak with a DCRC team member about any of these options as well as how to use our resources to meet in-kind requirements for your grant, please email dcrc@devereux.org. If your program has already included DCRC resource into your grant application and you would like to speak with us about writing a letter of support, we would welcome the opportunity to support your application.
