What an exciting time to be working on behalf of vulnerable infants and toddlers!
As you know, the Administration for Children and Families recently announced plans to fund Early Head Start – Child Care Partnerships. The Office of Head Start will award unprecedented funds to expand high quality learning to about 100,000 infants and toddlers. Community based child care – both centers and family child care – will house the expanded opportunities as partners of the Early Head Start grantees.
The vision of the EHS-Child Care Partnership is that the community partners will get more funding and support than they currently get in return for elevating their standards and practices to fully meet federal Head Start Performance Standards. These are standards that are almost always higher, more comprehensive and better for young children than the basic child care regulations.
The purpose of this blog is twofold. On the one hand, we will provide information about and analysis of the EHS-Child Care Partnership Initiate. This blog will gather news, information, and data from various trusted sources. Our aim is to present it in a timely, clear and accessible manner. Sometimes the sources will be the federal or state governments and sometimes reliable organizations and practitioners. We will regularly add our analysis and perspective. Our collaborative team and trusted colleagues in the field have solid experience in Early Head Start, child care, child care subsidies, organizational development and strategic partnering, start-up planning, finance, and the law. These are some of what we believe will be keys to successful EHS- Child Care partnerships.
The second purpose of this blog is to link potential applicants and partners to the tools and services that can help maximize success in planning for, going after, and implementing an EHS-Child Care Partnership grant.
We believe that the funding opportunity is monumental. We support the highest aspirations of this initiative – to make sure more infants and toddlers, particularly the most vulnerable, have access to the highest quality early learning. At the same time, we recognize that while this funding opportunity represents an enormous potential to advance that goal, it also carries significant challenges and risk.
We trust that you share our support of the spirit of the opportunity. We hope you will stay tuned as we help you decide whether this type of partnership is right for your agency and, if so, the smartest ways to develop partnerships and craft your strongest federal grant application. We’d like to help make sure you propose and negotiate funds for a start-up planner to support the successful implementation of your proposed partnership project.
We anticipate an exciting period as we await the release of these funding opportunities and then strategically respond to them. There is a lot your agency can do before they are released, so please subscribe to the blog or check back regularly!
We’d love to have you join our first webinar, “Ready or Not? Is This EHS-Child Care Partnership Grant Opportunity Right for Your Agency?” on March 13. Julie Shuell, former director of the National Child Care Information Center will be the facilitator. You can register here.
Between now and then, we’ll continue to share key information with you.
Thanks!
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Whether your agency might apply to be an EHS-CC Partnership grantee or your child care program is a solid partnership candidate, there’s a lot to consider. We can help analyze the opportunity, prepare a competitive grant proposal, or design and implement a high quality 18-month start up plan. If we can’t, we will connect you with the right resources to support your efforts. Give us a call to discuss your situation: 703-599-4329 or [email protected]