TO GET INVOLVED OR LEARN MORE:
ECPAC staff dedicated to family support and education work: Stephanie Henderson ~ Director of Child and Family Health and Wellbeing: stephanie@ecpac.org
Family Support & Education
ECPAC connects Adams County’s early childhood system so families get the education and support they need and children are ready to succeed at school and in life.
ECPAC is fortunate to have the involvement and leadership from many community organizations and family partners in helping us move our strategies forward to accomplish our goal to Increase access to available services and supports: Early childhood families have access to available community services and supports that effectively meet their needs and engages them to promote their child(ren)’s healthy growth, development, and readiness for school, with dedicated focus on children and families experiencing disparities.
ECPAC IS STRIVING TOWARDS…
- Increased access to available services and support for families with young children.
- Decreased rate of child abuse and neglect in Adams County.
THE STRATEGIES ECPAC IS EMPLOYING:
- ECPAC’s Family Resource and Support Center is co-located with more than a dozen community-serving programs at the Commerce City Community Campus (C4). This collaborative effort is dedicated to addressing the Social Determinants of Health, employing a multi-generation approach, and decreasing access barriers in our community.
- Promotion of the AdamsCountyResources.com resource and referral platform.
- Dissemination of social norming messages and public education through ECPAC’s “New Family Toolkit.”
- Research has shown that the Strengthening Families 5 Protective Factors increase positive outcomes for children and families including enhanced child development and reduced likelihood of child abuse and neglect. Given this, ECPAC strives to implement each of the Protective Factors into its work and offers trainings for organizational partners on how to promote the factors within their existing programming.
ECPAC facilitates the Creating Supportive Communities with Families Action Team, which is focused on strengthening families and preventing child maltreatment.
All of ECPAC’s Action Teams and Initiatives are working towards these strategies:
Committed to Priority
ECPAC partners have committed to the priority of ensuring that early childhood families have access to available community services and supports that effectively meet their needs and that the providers who serve them have the knowledge and resources they need to ensure comprehensive, high quality services. Therefore the ECPAC partnership works to:
- Increase awareness of family support and education opportunities and programs and support the use of the Referral Roadmap to help families access these opportunities and services;
- Increase availability of professional development opportunities for family support and education providers to improve quality of services;
- Identify and address community strengths and gaps/needs related to families accessing needed family support and education services;
- Increase offerings of family support, education, and leadership opportunities;
- Improve collaboration between service agencies to strive towards a coordinated and comprehensive service delivery model
- Working with six home visitation programs to support a comprehensive array of services and supports for young children and families.
- Working to ensure community-wide information for parents/families on how to promote school readiness skills and healthy development for young children.
- Implementing the Strengthening Families Framework to increase the community’s ability to increase protective factors for families and children. You can find the Protective Factors here in English and Spanish (Factores Protectores)
Additionally, ECPAC has a Family Engagement and Leadership Action Team, where partners work to help to improve family members get connected to leadership opportunities and find comprehensive ways for family voice in ECPAC efforts.
Parents are working on community projects to improve early childhood outcomes.
Maria Luisa Diaz recognized a serious problem in Adams County – Spanish-speaking special needs students weren’t getting the services they needed to thrive due to language and cultural barriers between families and schools. Through ECPAC’s Family Leadership Training Institute, Maria Luisa sought to solve this problem and ease these families’ frustration by developing and implementing a series of Spanish-language workshops, “Advocating for my Kids in Special Education: How to Develop an Effective IEP that Works Well for My Child.” She taught parents about the rights of students with special needs, the supports in place to help these students, how to lobby for appropriate supports, empowering them to be their children’s best advocate. Participants in ECPAC’s Family Leadership Training Institute are always working on community projects to improve early childhood outcomes so expect to see others like Maria Luisa’s in the future.
TO GET INVOLVED OR LEARN MORE:
ECPAC staff dedicated to family support and education work: Stephanie Henderson ~ Director of Child and Family Health and Wellbeing: stephanie@ecpac.org