Vancouver, WA-January 6th, 2019-Educational Opportunities for Children & Families is the recipient of over $9.8 million dollars in combined federal grant funding from the Office of Head Start. The news of the award comes at a pivotal time in the agency’s 52-year history. Recent robust strategic planning processes revealed the ingredients necessary for EOCF to respond to emerging conditions head on. The utilization of the Head Start funding allows EOCF to position itself as a leader in early learning in Southwest Washington. “While the agency remains the same, the services and facilities will adapt to better meet community needs and improve economic stability in the region” Rekah Strong said.
In addition to adapting services to meet community needs, EOCF will also be utilizing a portion of the grant for our facilities development and expansion to make our family services more accessible. EOCF wants to ensure that services are delivered to all children who qualify, children with disabilities, children in foster care, and families experiencing homelessness. Increasing our facilities master plan will help position ourselves for future expansion, and it will allow us to increase our services to our community.
To meet the needs of our community, EOCF has adjusted the services we deliver. The families we serve have unique cultural needs that require care and intentionality when designing our engagement strategies and processes. Our mission: “To connect, empower, and transform the lives of children and families” requires that we not only adopt a community-based participatory approach, we must operationalize it. At EOCF, we utilize every opportunity to bring the community to the design table to help develop programs and interventions that address their needs by focusing on the local context. We see our community members as experts in their experience, and we value their insights and engage them as partners.
EOCF programs serve children facing the highest risk factors in our community through a dual generation approach that is vital to the lives of children and the overall community, explains Rekah Strong, Executive Director of Educational Opportunities for Children & Families, “Early childhood is the most critical period of development, the key to breaking barriers and creating lifelong potential. We use a uniquely effective model using a whole-child, comprehensive, multi-generational approach.”
Our commitment to our children, families and community must include equity and inclusion.
Actively utilizing an organizational equity lense to inform all decisions, operations and practices requires an extreme commitment to equitable outcomes for all children and families. At EOCF, we are vigilant in our commitment to sustaining practices that support families in determining their own goals and focused outcomes. We believe this is the key to being good service providers and truly helping families to thrive.
With this in mind, we have taken the feedback from our parent survey in which the desire for more cultural validation within our curricular materials and service delivery was clearly stated. At EOCF we do not regard equity standards and practices as a theoretical framework that we add on to our current methods. Equity is incorporated into every aspect of our work and is a thread that connects our values, our approaches and our standards. At EOCF, we believe this provides us with an amazing opportunity to maximize impact within our early learning community.