Technical Assistance with Early Head Start/Child Care Partnerships

As The Gravely Group has grown through the years, we have had the unique opportunity to provide quality technical assistance to the Early Head Start programs. Early Head Start/Child Care Partnerships have been our focal point in the last few months. By encouraging Early Head Start grantees to partner with family child care providers to deliver community-based services, the federal offices highlight the need for local agencies to leave behind their silos for a more integrated approach to serving vulnerable families.

This project is built on the premise that for these partnerships to be effective, communities had to establish an infrastructure that supports collaboration between Head Start/Early Head Start programs funded by the Office of Head Start and services funded through the Child Care Development Fund (CCDF) by the Office of Child Care and state funds.

The purpose of the project is to design, implement, and evaluate a replicable framework to support partnerships between Early Head Start and family child care providers and had four overall goals:

• Higher-quality care for low-income children in family child care homes
• Coordinated and comprehensive services for families
• Support to increase the capacity of family child care providers
• Strong partnerships that support coordinated service delivery in communities

Boys Town of Louisiana is one of the new Early Head Start/Partnership Grantee that The Gravely Group has worked with in the last few months. Located in New Orleans, Louisiana, Boys Town Louisiana (BTLA) opened in 1989, and today meets the needs of youth and families through a variety of Integrated Continuum of Care® services. BTLA has combined with three local Four Star early childhood care providers to form the Early Head Start School Readiness Partnership (SRP). The School Readiness Partnership provides high quality, comprehensive and seamless school readiness services for families of infants and toddlers in low-income New Orleans communities.

These services are mainly for young parents who could benefit from learning additional parenting skills and having additional support and resources to help them reach their goals and build a happy, healthy family.

The Gravely Group has been instrumental in:

• Developing service plans
• Policy/procedure manuals
• Strategic plans
• Training new Early Head Start Grantee staff
• Providing shared Governance training for the Board of Directors

This has developed into a great relationship for The Gravely Group and Boys Town of Louisiana. We look forward to our continued rapport. We are excited to see BTLA grow and develop into a high quality early childhood program.

Tags: boys town louisiana, child care partnerships, Early Head Start