In 2020, Start Early was selected to lead the implementation of the National Center for Parent, Family and Community Engagement (NCPFCE), one of four National Centers that develop evidence-based best practices for Early Head Start and Head Start programs across the country.

The NCPFCE identifies, develops and disseminates evidence-based best practices to support the growth and development of young children and strengthen families and communities.

Start Early will focus on creating high-quality responsive training and technical assistance, rooted in equity and cultural and linguistic responsiveness, to support staff, families and communities nationwide.

Our Work & Focus on Equity

Our belief that all change happens through relationships will shape the project activities, training, technical assistance, and resources produced by the NCPFCE.

Working with a consortium of partners, Start Early will lead the NCPFCE to support family well-being, effective family and community engagement, and children’s school readiness, including transitions to kindergarten. These partnerships will integrate the research-practice knowledge of family and community engagement, human services, early childhood, social work, mental health, parenting, leadership, and family economic mobility into the NCPFCE content and activities.

The NCPFCE will have a strong equity focus and seeks to bring program, family and community voice to the forefront of early childhood education. Throughout the project, schools in the Educare Learning Network and other Early Head Start and Head Start grantees will serve as on-the-ground labs for piloting and field-testing innovations in parent, family and community engagement.

Our Partners

• Child Trends
• LIFT
• Early Learning Lab
• Fred Rogers Center
• UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute

Our Funders

The National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (NCPFCE) is jointly administered by the Office of Head Start and the Office of Child Care.

Start Early is pleased to announce it has been awarded the National Center on Parent, Family, and Community Engagement (NCPFCE) by the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Head Start, in partnership with the Office of Child Care. The NCPFCE is one of four National Centers that develop evidence-based best practices for Early Head Start and Head Start programs across the country, as part of a comprehensive Office of Head Start Training and Technical Assistance System.

This award provides up to $5.9 million annually ($29.5 million over 5 years) to Start Early and a consortium of partners — Child Trends, LIFT, Early Learning Lab, Fred Rogers Center, and the UNC Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute — to support family well-being, effective family and community engagement, and children’s school readiness, including transitions to kindergarten. These partnerships will integrate the research-practice knowledge of family and community engagement, human services, early childhood, social work, mental health, parenting, leadership, and family economic mobility into the NCPFCE content and activities. Start Early will focus on creating high-quality responsive training and technical assistance, rooted in equity and cultural and linguistic responsiveness, to support staff, families and communities nationwide.

“We are honored to work with an incredible group of partners as we continue building upon Head Start’s commitment to parents as their child’s first teachers,” said Start Early president Diana Rauner. “Together we will further bring family engagement, parent voice and community engagement to the forefront of early childhood education over the next five years.”

The NCPFCE identifies, develops and disseminates evidence-based best practices to support the growth and development of young children and strengthen families and communities. Its work includes providing training and technical assistance on staff-family relationship building practices that are culturally and linguistically responsive; integrated and systemic family engagement strategies that are outcomes-based; and consumer education, family leadership, family economic stability, and individualized support for families facing adversity.

The NCPFCE will have a strong equity focus and will partner with schools in the Educare Learning Network and other Early Head Start/Head Start (EHS/HS) grantees across the country to create, pilot and field test innovations in parent, family and community engagement. This will ensure that training and technical assistance (TTA) activities result in high-quality comprehensive services that bring diverse family, community and program voices to the center of the work.

Start Early brings nearly 40 years of expertise delivering best-in-class doula, home visiting and Early Head Start and Head Start programs and advocating for thoughtful policies and adequate funding at the local, state, and federal levels. From roots directly serving families and children on Chicago’s South Side and in rural Illinois, Start Early has expanded to impact early childhood programs and policies nationwide, with partnerships in 25 states.

Dr. Rebecca Berlin, senior vice president of quality, solutions and impact and Dr. Mallary Swartz, director of family engagement research at Start Early will serve as principal investigators for the NCPFCE. Berlin has more than 25 years of experience in strategic visioning in the early childhood field, including assessment and professional development initiatives. Swartz brings 20 years of experience as an applied researcher in family engagement and relationships-based professional development in early childhood education, particularly EHS/HS programs.

Start Early has also hired Brandi Black Thacker, director of TTA and integrated services and Manda Lopez Klein, director of the NCPFCE to lead the NCPFCE. Together, the two early childhood professionals bring a combined 40 years of experience as Head Start leaders and advocates to the work.

Throughout her career, Thacker has served communities as an educator, case manager, advocate, Head Start director, TTA specialist and served as the director of TTA for the NCPFCE for the past nine years. Klein is a former Head Start director and the founding executive director of the National Migrant and Seasonal Head Start Association (MSHS), and is an expert in curriculum development, family engagement material development, and professional development, including services for monolingual and bilingual families.

“As national Head Start leaders and advocates, Brandi and Manda bring decades of experience collaborating with families and community partners to the new NCPFCE,” said Rebecca Berlin, senior vice president of quality, solutions and impact. “Under their leadership, the NCPFCE will continue to elevate diverse voices that strengthen the work and ensure better outcomes for children and families across the country.”

As a first step, Start Early will sign the cooperative agreement later this month and launch the center by the end of November.

About Start Early

Start Early (formerly known as the Ounce of Prevention) is a nonprofit public-private partnership advancing quality early learning and care for families with children, before birth through their earliest years, to help close the opportunity gap. For nearly 40 years, Start Early has delivered best-in-class doula, home visiting, and Early Head Start and Head Start programs. Bringing expertise in program delivery, research and evaluation, professional development, and policy and advocacy, Start Early works in partnership with communities and other experts to drive systemic change so millions more children, families and educators can thrive.

Watch as NEAR@Home facilitators explore topics such as the power of listening, the parallel process and the therapeutic use of self in these meaningful conversations that discuss best practices and aim to empower home visitors.

In the last three decades, scientific research has demonstrated how deeply adversity in childhood becomes embedded into biology, behavior, and risk, and how these can be passed on to future generations. This body of science — Neuroscience, Epigenetics, Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE), and Resilience research, or NEAR — is one of the largest public health discoveries of our time.

Home visitors knowledgeable about the NEAR sciences and research are interested in bringing this information to families but worry about causing harm. The NEAR@Home toolkit addresses these concerns and provides strategies for engaging parents in discussing NEAR sciences and using the ACEs questionnaire in a safe, respectful and effective way for both home visitor and family.

Home visitors are uniquely positioned to help families mitigate the effects of past, present, and future adversity through supporting protective, responsive parenting and safe attachment relationships. The NEAR@Home process gives parents choice, offering information, assuring safety, being respectful, allowing time and space for reflection, and by always closing with hope and resilience.

The NEAR@Home toolkit was created, tested, and revised by home visitors, mental health providers, and other experts in the field of NEAR and home visiting in Alaska, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. The NEAR@Home toolkit is designed as a training manual with guided processes to help you learn and practice language and strategies to safely and effectively talk about the trauma of ACEs. We emphasize safety and reflective support for the home visitor as a critical element in this process.

The NEAR @Home toolkit was developed as a self-study process and is being shared without cost because we believe that all home visitors deserve to have access to this guidance. Many home visitors discovered that while self-study of the NEAR@Home toolkit was useful, they preferred a supported learning experience and have informed the development of NEAR@Home Facilitated Learning. Learning how to be safe, respectful, and effective while talking about the NEAR sciences with parents is a complex process that requires and deserves time and support.

The NEAR@Home Facilitated Learning process is very different from most training programs. Thinking about, talking about childhood trauma stirs feelings in all of us, whether ACEs are part of our life story or not. Our learning process is guided by Facilitators who are relationship focused, trauma sensitive, and fluent in infant mental health concepts and processes. The Facilitators model self-regulation, co-regulation, spacious listening, and reflective processes to walk with home visitors and supervisors through learning how to do a NEAR home visit. Implementation Science guides the structure of the learning process from a mutual exploration of fit and feasibility to follow up reflective consultation to support home visitors as they integrate these new skills.

The value of and the need for this platform was immediately clear. For example, at the beginning of the pandemic, a child development director from Arizona asked fellow members to share their strategies on how to best support child care workers adopt guidelines set by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on wearing protective face coverings while balancing concerns for how this might impact day-to-day interactions with children. Responses from members across the country poured in, offering ideas of the different types of masks she could investigate and giving the director a sense of validation and connectedness. Ultimately, the director learned of masks with clear mouth coverings that are now in use in her pre-K classroom to better support children in reading their lips when speaking.

This is just one of many connections that resulted in an improved practice on the ground across our country. As we continue to build on the success of Early Childhood Connector, we are excited about the potential this initiative has to accelerate knowledge sharing and spread promising practices across early childhood partner networks to improve outcomes for children and their families.

In this blog post, Start Early vice president of translational research, Debra Pacchiano, highlights her recently published research on the importance of providing strong and nurturing leadership to early childhood teachers in order to improve child outcomes.

Recent early childhood research has confirmed that— if we want teachers to nourish children, we must first nourish teachers.

When a child begins their life-long learning journey, parents and families expect they will be cared for and taught in safe, positive, and effective environments. Unfortunately, that’s not always the case. The quality of early learning programs varies tremendously with the highest quality programs disproportionately serving children from the most advantaged homes. By contrast, lower quality and less effective programs disproportionately serve children from under-resourced communities—the very children who stand to benefit most from top-notch early childhood education (Valentino 2017).

Teaching is complex work. In early childhood, teachers work with young children, often from vulnerable populations, who are in critical developmental stages. Variations in children’s early learning outcomes are often attributed to under-engaged teachers and low-quality teaching. Yet, all too often teachers face their complex work without needed sustained supports from leadership and their peers.

Start Early has worked at the intersection of research, practice, and policy for more than three decades, spearheading innovation and quality improvement in early childhood education. We activate creativity to design solutions rooted in research and applied science to address chronic issues in the field.

As part of this work, we spent time observing early childhood education programs, some that were high functioning and some that were not. We talked with leaders, teachers, staff, and families about what supports and what hinders their effectiveness advancing young children’s learning. Differences in their organizational mindsets and practices were unmistakable. Simply put, high-performing programs had organizational environments far more supportive of teaching, learning, and family engagement than lower-performing programs. In response, we built The Essential 0-5 Survey (formerly known as the Early Education Essentials), an organizationwide measurement system that elevates the voices of teachers, staff, and families in early childhood settings and empowers collective action towards improvement.

A recent Education Week study found substantial gaps between the perceived and real impacts of leadership on teachers. By highlighting teacher and staff perspectives on organizational strengths and weaknesses in key areas of climate and culture, The Essential 0-5 Survey can help close those gaps between the impacts leaders believe they have, and the impacts teachers and staff actually feel.

In a Young Children journal article, published by myself and other Start Early researchers, we highlight the positive impacts The Early Education Essentials can have on early childhood environments and teachers’ experiences. The article features the clear differences that were identified, through The Early Education Essentials, between organizations strong in the areas of effective instructional leaders, collaborative teachers, involved families, supportive environment, and ambitious instruction, and those that were weak in those areas. Listen to what one teacher in a strongly organized program had to say about her organizational culture:

I feel like it’s empowering [here]—it’s not just from the top down. It’s right here, and we believe in this stuff and I have something to share and it’s valued by our administrator. Then your co-teachers and your colleagues also buy in too, and you have that energy and you have that love. Then you have an administrator that pushes you in that way and supports you and guides you and nudges you a bit farther. I think it’s kind of what we try to do with our students too, now, even when they’re only 3. I think [the principal/ director] leads by example, for sure.

Strong organizational environments in early childhood education empower leaders, teachers and families to aspire to and realize higher-quality practices and better outcomes for young children.

In this blog post, home visiting expert and former Start Early vice president for training, Janelle Weldin-Frisch, MA, explains the importance of bridging the gap between systems in the home visiting sector through the use of professional development.

Intensive, long-term home visiting services are proven to produce the best outcomes for families and help prepare children for school. Understanding the factors that keep families engaged in these services has given rise to research, training and evolved program requirements. And yet, sustaining family engagement is still often regarded as the primary responsibility of the home visitor. Family engagement is an impossible task alone for even the most highly skilled a home visitor. Strong partnerships at the systems, community and practitioner levels all impact what happens between a family and their home visitor.

At this year’s National Home Visiting Summit, I’ll be sharing a case study of two state leaders that are partnering across systems to strengthen the outcomes of each of their programs. In my session – Bridge Gaps between Systems with Professional Development – I’ll explore how this strategic collaboration can be replicated with other state and system leaders, to improve outcomes across the sector.

Some of the factors impacting family engagement include reliable program funding, competitive salaries for home visitors and supervisors, and access to professional development. With the turnover rate of home visitors exceeding 20% annually, it is critical that system leaders construct a professional development framework to support and retain home visitors and supervisors. In the example shared during the session, we will explore how the two state leaders leveraged a professional development resource – The Essentials of Home Visiting – to develop and implement a PD framework for their home visitors and supervisors. The Essentials of Home Visiting, an online professional development program with unique learning experiences created specifically for home visitors and supervisors, includes self-paced courses, webinars, and tools for supervisors to increase their impact on home visitors, and improve their outcomes with families.

Ensuring that home visiting practitioners have the organizational, supervisory and professional development supports to keep them engaged in the field, are essential factors in promoting family engagement between home visitor and parent.

Janelle Weldin-Frisch, MA, was the vice president for training at Start Early during her twenty-seven year tenure. She continues in a consulting capacity to facilitate a national community of practice for professional development in home visiting, cultivate strategic partnerships and provide state and regional leaders with technical assistance in the use of The Essentials of Home Visiting.

Start Early has long believed that a child’s first and most important teacher is their parent. That is why we have been an early champion of recognizing home visiting as a key component of early childhood systems of care and education.

Our very own Nick Wechsler, director for program development at Start Early, has been influencing the home visiting field in Illinois for 30 years and was recently honored as the recipient of the Home Visiting Leadership Award at the Annual Prevent Child Abuse Illinois Statewide Conference.

A Passion for Building Relationships

Nick, who holds a master’s degree in Infant Studies, started his career in the early 1970s, working as a community mental health worker in Chicago, providing therapy to communities in need under the supervision of licensed clinicians. Nick credits his experiences as a stay-at-home dad and as a family day care provider for preparing him for what ultimately became Start Early’s home visiting approach: relationship-based work.

Home Visiting – Helping Parents Through a Life-Changing Transition

Nick’s personal and professional experiences with new parenthood ultimately showed him that home visiting services can considerably support both children and parents.

The days and weeks following the birth of a child can be a time of great joy and excitement for all parents. Developmental science tells us that these first interactions between parents and newborns lay the foundation for a child’s healthy development in school and life. This can also can be a time of extreme stress for parents, exacerbated by exhaustion during a period of physical, hormonal and emotional vulnerability.

Home visitors can provide much-needed support to help ease new parents’ anxieties and provide them with the tools and knowledge to develop the secure attachments that allow children to thrive. By helping parents engage in meaningful play and learning interactions with their children, home visitors influence the development of nurturing relationships that support a child’s ability to grow and learn.

Home Visiting – The Early Years

Today, early childhood home visiting is an established part of national policy and is a publicly subsidized practice here in the U.S. and in many countries around the globe. But it wasn’t always so, Nick reminds us.

Public policy and subsidized center-based care for very young children was limited until 1995, when Early Head Start (EHS) was established. EHS extended home visiting into the Head Start model and added group care as an option for children from birth to age 3.

In the early years, Nick says, childcare professionals didn’t have what we now know as evidence-based models for home visiting. In the 1990s, home visitors drew on the theories of emerging brain science to inform what simply made good sense in supporting parenting: that a child’s early experiences and secure attachments with parents and caregivers lay the emotional, social and cognitive foundation for healthy development and learning.

Championing Home Visiting in Illinois and Beyond

“When I started working at Start Early,” Nick remembers, “we were primarily focused on providing home visiting to teenage parents. In fact, we were the only publicly-funded statewide network for home visiting.”

Throughout his first decade at Start Early, Nick trained and supported home visitors, helping them expand their base of knowledge and enhance skills and practice. He credits this early period for laying the foundation for Start Early’s own approach to home visiting. As early pioneers in the field, Start Early ultimately became a leader in innovating service approaches and advocating for better access to home visiting across Illinois.

The landscape is much different today – home visiting has become more professionalized and is evaluated with the highest level of scientific rigor. The federal government has created guidelines and funds home visiting services through Early Head Start programs. New legislation made possible by the 2010 Affordable Care Act allowed for $351 million to be appropriated annually to support approximately 150,000 parents and children through almost 1 million home visits a year as part of the federal government’s Maternal Infant Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) programs.

Reaching More Children and Families

Over the last three decades, the scope of Start Early’s home visiting work has expanded, and Nick’s work has been key to this development. Under his purview, work that was limited to teenage parents at the beginning has grown in its depth and breadth.

Start Early designs, delivers, trains and supports home visitors who work in under-resourced communities, including home visiting for mothers experiencing homelessness, as well as those in the criminal justice system. Nick and Start Early have also been working with state advocates and local communities to establish a new approach to this work – universal newborn supportive services – which offers all parents home visiting in the first weeks after birth.

“Nick has dedicated years of professional service to support and promote healthy interactions between babies and the people in their lives they count on most to nurture, teach, love and protect them. He exudes a reflective mindset that has shaped many of us as professionals, and he is a trusted and highly valued thought partner, mentor and colleague,” Kelly Woodlock, vice president of national home visiting, says.

Start Early congratulates Nick for this great recognition and we thank him for his commitment to serving children and families!

“The recognition is a bit awkward, yet it also fills me with great gratification and joy. It truly makes my career’s work visible. Knowing that ideas and labor that came from within me have become useful tools for home visitors, that my creations reach into homes and become meaningful in the lives of children and parents during home visits throughout Illinois – this is a personal and professional treasure,” says Nick.

Start Early recently received IACET accreditation for its professional development programs. In this blog post, we share our insights on how Start Early is building expertise and scaling its impact in the early childhood field.

Innovative thinking, commitment to excellence and a drive to improve: three key aspects of any organization determined to be the cream of the crop. Start Early is steadfastly pursuing all three, exemplified by our recent IACET accreditation of our professional development offerings.

The International Association of Continuing Education Training (IACET) accreditation is the gold standard in professional development. Receiving this honor is the ultimate validation of the quality training and learning experiences that we provide to the field. Start Early has always focused on tackling the challenges facing the field of early childhood education on a national scale, and this recent IACET accreditation will now allow us to do that with even greater impact.

If you’re new to IACET, you may be wondering why IACET programs are so highly regarded? The application process is rigorous, and requires detailed information and evidence supporting every facet of the program, from environments and support systems to record maintenance and follow-up evaluation of learning outcomes. The entire application process took us over a year, and we’re thrilled to say that we can now offer IACET Continuing Education Units to participants in select training programs.

Receiving IACET accreditation has been a long road for Start Early, and a road we continue to travel as we innovate additional professional development offerings for the field. Start Early’s commitment to impacting high-quality early childhood education has been recognized, and we will only go forward from here.

Start Early has been committed to serving parents and families directly for nearly 40 years, and we continue to grow our ability to impact families beyond our direct reach. Through high-quality professional development programs, we have taken the research-based methods applied in our programs and made them available to practitioners and leaders across the field of early childhood education.

We are proud to announce that we have received the International Association for Continuing Education and Training (IACET) accreditation. The IACET accreditation adds a level of validation to our training programs and provides early education professionals with learning experiences that demonstrate elevated expertise, help them continue advancing in their careers and expand their skill sets.

Our professional development offerings consist of in-person and online learning experiences focused on a range of aspects within early childhood education. These opportunities help early education leaders grow in their work and address their most crucial areas of need.

Currently, these programs have received IACET accreditation:

• The Essential Practices of Educare allows program leaders and practitioners to improve their skills and knowledge, leveraging the Educare Learning Network’s research-backed model to deliver stronger results for children and families.
• The Essentials of Home Visiting is a best-in-class online training program for home visitors. It includes innovative online courses and webinars for home visitors, supervisors, and family engagement professionals. These learning experiences were created by Start Early’s home visiting experts based on decades of leadership in home visiting throughout Illinois.

We are actively pursuing IACET accreditation for the following programs:

• The Essential 0-5 Survey is a unique measurement and leadership tool for early education leaders to address the core characteristics that contribute to the success of early childhood education institutions. The Essential 0-5 Survey provides in-depth analysis that allows teachers and organizational leaders to collectively improve the culture of their program and provide a stronger learning environment for children.
• The Essential Fellowship is an intensive leadership fellowship that provides leaders with the opportunity to learn how to build systems and routines that improve classroom instruction.

Our professional development programs provide the opportunity to share Start Early’s wealth of knowledge with early childhood professionals across the country, as well as learn alongside them to iterate, innovate and improve.