On September 20, 2023 we began the first in our new series, Our Collective Wisdom. We have chosen this year to highlight the good-works of our local early childhood collaboratives (LECCs), through our Collective Spotlight series. With Our Collective Wisdom series, we will choose a topic that we have seen several of our LECCs working on. We will reach out to the program directors and invite them to share with the Collective, at our scheduled professional development meetings, their process in getting the work or project up and running. Attendees can ask questions and learn from their own peers how to improve or simply get their initiatives off the ground.

This month the topic was Parent or Community Cafes. We welcomed Donna Farr, the School Readiness (SR) Liaison from the Manchester Early Childhood Collaborative, Christopher Badenhop, SR Liaison for the City of New Britain and the Parent Cafe Project Coordinator, Nicole Villanueva, Family Engagement Specialist with the New Britain Parent’s Cafe Project, and Jo Ettienne-Modeste, a Parent Ambassador for the Alliance for Bloomfield’s Children, who gave a parent’s perspective in the process of organizing Community and Parent Cafes. We hope this Collective Wisdom Series promotes unity and continuous quality improvement among our Collective members.

You can watch the full recording HERE.