Early Childhood Pioneer Sue Russell Honored at National Conference with Karen W. Ponder Leadership Award
NCPC Board Chair Dr. Nancy H. Brown awards Sue Russell the 2013 Karen W. Ponder Leadership Award
Sue Russell, one of the key leaders and architects of North Carolina’s early childhood system, was awarded the Karen W. Ponder Leadership Award at the 2013 National Smart Start Conference. The award, named for Smart Start’s former president, recognizes outstanding service to young children and families in North Carolina.
“There are many people that have been instrumental in the progress that North Carolina has made in creating a nationally recognized early care and education system that has inspired so many other states. If all of those people were asked to point to the person most instrumental in helping them to contribute to creating the vision of our system, I am confident that they would all point to Sue Russell,” said Peggy Ball, former Director of the Division of Child Development and Chair of the North Carolina Child Care Coalition.
Sue is the architect of the nation’s most well-known and replicated initiatives designed to help early childhood teachers gain greater levels of education, earn a living a wage and provide children with more stable relationships. The T.E.A.C.H. Early Childhood® Project provides scholarships to child care workers to complete early childhood course work and to increase their compensation. The Child Care WAGE$® Project provides education-based salary supplements to low-paid teachers, directors and family child care providers working with children between the ages of birth to five.
Sue brought this same creative spirit and problem-solving sensibility to helping envision and bring to fruition North Carolina’s nationally recognized early childhood initiatives, Smart Start and NC Pre-K. She went on to launch the Child Care Services Association, now one of the most well respected early care and education non-profit agencies in the nation, offering a broad range of services to child care programs and families. Every day, Child Care Services Association’s work demonstrates the agency’s mission of ensuring accessible, affordable high quality child care for all young children and their families, providing services to almost 100,000 children every year.
