Each Child. Every Community.

The Smart Start Network works year-round to ensure children and families are supported, creating a brighter future for each child in every community. Each Local Partnership provides critical social and emotional support, needed resources and referrals, crucial infrastructure support, and innovative solutions to ensure children have what they need to thrive. To celebrate the new year, Smart Start will showcase the impact of the Network with early care and education, family support, early literacy, health and nutrition, and with early childhood system support and building. To learn more about Smart Start, you can read Smart Start’s 2021-2022 Impact Report.

The Smart Start Network provides critical infrastructure needed for families to receive support to be the best parents they can be.  Local Partnerships offer evidence-based and evidence-informed, family-focused programs that offer support and training to promote positive parenting practices and increase parent confidence. Other Local Partnership support includes providing needed referrals for other family support resources and coordinating support for children and families.

Smart Start also provides critical family support resources for North Carolina. This includes:

• Smart Start leading its Family Engagement and Leadership Initiative, providing over a hundred technical assistance opportunities to partnership staff, hosting monthly Community of Practice meetings, and supporting Local Partnerships in building family engagement and leadership efforts.
• Smart Start and Family Connects International, launching a three-year pilot program to serve families of newborns. Over 1,000 families were served in 8 counties in the first seven months of the pilot program. Current participating counties include Watauga, Ashe, Avery, Cumberland, Hoke, and Robeson.
• The North Carolina Partnership for Children (NCPC) administering North Carolina’s Home Visiting and Parenting Education (HVPE) System, which aims to build a coordinated system to provide all families of young children access to a range of parenting education supports.

Local Level Support is Key

At the local level, Smart Start Local Partnerships implement parenting, home visiting, and other family support services to children and families to improve parenting and promote parent involvement and parent leadership.

Examples of Local Partnerships supporting families include:

• The Albemarle Alliance for Children and Families, serving children in Bertie, Camden, Currituck, Gates, and Pasquotank Counties, offered a 13-week Nurturing Father’s program. A father taking part in the session, reported that he increased custody of his son, whom he previously only saw once a month. All the participants from the Spring 2022 session enjoyed the program so much that they requested a part two.
• A grandmother raising her grandchild in Alexander County. A woman raising her great-grandson participated in the Alexander County Partnership for Children’s Circle of Parents program. She remarked that the Circle gives her a small break and a chance to get tips from other mothers. The partnership also connected her with Early Head Start and she is now enrolled in a home visiting program.

You can learn more about the impact Smart Start has had across the state with early care and education by reading Smart Start’s 2021-2022 Annual Report.