Creative Strategies Mean Finding A Way. We Did It!

Check out the issue of the scheduling of low wage workers raised in the Shriver Report.

Just check this out:

Public childcare is, like public education, an investment in the future of the country. By providing children with high quality early education and care, we ensure that they are starting off right – while also making it easier for their parents to maintain employment. Subsidized care is crucial – the costs of quality childcare are very high, yet, quality childcare is important for both the safety and future of our children. Our research consistently shows that childcare has positive effects for a variety of outcomes including increasing employment, wages, and avoiding poverty. Publicly subsidized early education and care also can help ensure that childcare workers have strong educational backgrounds in childhood development, and are paid accordingly – so that they, too, can support their families.

One in five children are living in poverty and it is so apparent at Vincent House where all the children are living in extreme poverty and are experiencing the trauma of their family being homeless.

It is crucial at this time we provide high quality day care. Do you know you have to have a job to get on the three month waiting list for free childcare? Shocking isn’t it.

Through a great partnership with CANI and United Way we are able to put children living in Vincent House into high quality daycare and help them experience the structure and cognitive stimulation they need.

When our moms are in a 40 hour a week HOME Academy schedule of employment and self sufficiency classes they are learning what they need to and they receive a daycare voucher as part of this partnership. We will never get these developmental years back so it is an urgent issue and it is everyone’s issue because this child will be set up for a future full of extreme challenges if we cannot intervene now. We are also teaching parents how to have positive interaction.

Just this week the ladies from Women United brought bags of puzzles, games and puppets and showed our parents how to have quality family time- positive and nurturing interaction. Many of our parents did not ever have this themselves so instead of getting angry about the situation and sad for the children we teach, we support and we believe in them so they can be the parents they really want to be but just don’t know how.