Each Child. Every Community.

Collaborative practices with families are integral for successful child outcomes—at program, organization, and cross-systems-levels. When creating a culture of collaboration with family members, there are multiple flows of communication: caregivers, teachers, and program staff will engage in bi-directional information sharing with families. Programs and organizations will support family-to-family connections and system building collaboratives will create active feedback loops with a community of family ambassadors. Birth-to-five entities will explicitly invite parents to join them in a variety of roles. Some parents will be invited to actively participate in a responsive relationship with program providers or to offer input and feedback that informs planning or implementation activities, while other parents will be invited to co-create strategy or execution, as well as advocate for systems change that produces population-level change. In developing partnerships with parents, birth to five professionals must recognize the historical and current lived experience of their family partners. Asking parents about their child’s strengths, interests and challenging behaviors can provide helpful insights. Parents also have important insights about the strengths and needs of their community. Collaborative family engagement requires self-reflection, understanding and the ability to see things from another’s perspective. Policymakers and family-serving entities can build on the established family advisory councils and committees of agencies such as Head Start.  Once an atmosphere of trust is built between family members and entities serving birth to five, children benefit.

 Related Guiding Principles: Responsive Relationships, Shared Decisions, Communication

Resources:

Creating a Culture of Collaborative Family Engagement. Getting Smart

Creating Partnerships with Families. (PDF) Early Childhood Consultation Partnership© A program of Advanced Behavioral Health

Building Partnerships: Guide to Developing Relationships with Families. Head Start, Early Learning Knowledge Center

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North Carolina desires a system that is explicitly and measurably equitable and advances change that ensures children are not disadvantaged by race, ethnicity, and/or social class. An equity-driven approach, in systems building, programs, and services, acknowledges four levels of change: personal, interpersonal, institutional and structural. There are specific strategies and behaviors which are necessary at each level to move positive outcomes related to racial equity. Individuals and groups who are effective in relating to others not like themselves, actively include those typically excluded, share power, surface issues of racial inequality in interpersonal relationships, act to support positive change, and work to reduce interpersonal conflict. Birth-to-five entities apply a racial equity/economic justice lens to their policies, practices, regulations and work-culture to dismantle policies that perpetuate inequality and design/develop policies and practices that advance opportunities, fairness, access to resources, and other factors for those most effected by racial inequality. Investments alone will not fix the issues at hand. Policies that support equitable outcomes prioritize the needs of children and families with a history of racial, economic, or geographic marginalization. In pursuit of structural change, individuals and groups recognize that structural arrangements are interconnected and often resistant to change. They develop approaches to advance equity that offer new or reconstituted structural arrangements, and they build shared leadership and collective power that leads to change.

Related Guiding Principles: Advocacy, Accountability 

Further Resources:

Advancing Equity-Driven Family Engagement for Systems Change in Early Childhood. (PDF). Early Childhood-LINC

Manifesto for Race Equity & Parent Leadership in Early Childhood Systems. (PDF). Early Childhood-LINC

Equity Starts Early: Addressing Racial Inequities in Child Care and Early Education Policy. (PDF). CLASP

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A Family-centered and strengths-based approach to partnering with families requires decision-making, goal-setting, and accountability based on family experiences and perspectives. The wisdom, strengths, and expertise of family recipients and family ambassadors must influence policy development, service design, and evaluation. These family-agency partnerships require birth-to-five serving entities, community collaboratives and individual organizations, to prioritize family-centered environments—welcoming, safe, trusted environments. Agencies and collaborative entities, professionals and local policy makers are encouraged to formally and informally assess the accessibility of information shared with families and local residents and to monitor the range and relevancy of programs and resources. Agency teams will consistently work individually and with others, to understand their own policies and procedures, values, implicit biases, unconscious racism, and relative privileges that prevent a shift in power from agency-led to family-led. Conducting professional development in the areas of equity and cultural and linguistic competence is necessary for those agency representatives who work closely with families being served. When professionals across sectors and systems work to understand their commonalities and differences in family engagement and align their family-centered practice, cross-system collaboration produces a consistent experience for the same children, youth, and families. Local communities are encouraged to implement a cross-disciplinary approach to family-centered practice. An important mantra for family-centered activities, is “nothing about me, without me”.

Related Guiding Principles: Welcoming Environments, Program Planning

Further Resources:

What is Family Centered Practice? The University of Iowa National Resource Center for Family Centered Practice

Family Centered Practice. Child Welfare Information Gateway

A Guide for Advancing Family-Centered and Culturally and Linguistically Competent Care. National Center for Cultural Competence, Georgetown University Center for Child and Human Development

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Within a culture of collaboration, equity-driven strategies, and family-centered approaches, families require access to information and opportunities that make it possible for them to influence program, agency, and system-level decisions. Individual staff, organizations, and alliances develop techniques and dispositions for involving parents in decision-making processes. They explicitly communicate steps in their decision-making processes and actively work to reduce ambiguity. Recipient families are invited to reflect on background information, current conditions, and any goals required to make informed decisions. Key materials related to decision-making are available and made accessible by focusing on literacy level, formats, and language. Agencies consistently communicate to families that their input is valid and how their engagement influences decisions. Individual agencies and alliances apply adult learning strategies to educate family members about decision cycles—how outcomes of decisions are accessed to determine the need for additional decisions. Efforts are made to communicate all phases of agency and systems-level change, from brainstorming to ongoing evaluation of programs and practices.

Related Guiding Principles: Advocacy, Accountability 

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