The village has been working to raise a child, so to speak, for a long time, and the Elkhart County village is upgrading its approach.

A new initiative, led by the Community Foundation with Horizon Education Alliance, The SOURCE, and Crossroads United Way will address ways to help more children arrive at kindergarten ready to reach their full potential. The initiative will focus on a systems-level approach, considering how the various existing programs and services contribute to success and where opportunities for improvement exist.

Candy Yoder, chief program officer for the Community Foundation, has spent her entire career focused on the well-being of children. Others in the community have also done great work on that front. “It’s really clear there are many professionals with long history and experience who are committed to this work,” she says. “There is a great deal of interest. It’s time now to
consider how the entire system can be improved.”

The Community Foundation has had an abiding interest in kids and families as an area of focus; community listening sessions consistently raise this as a top priority for the community. When areas of emphasis were approved by the board in 2020, early childhood development and education was selected for the Kids and Families Committee. Historically most grant funding has been awarded for singular programs and projects. This new initiative will identify a more collective and systemic approach for grant investments.

In September 2021, those leading the initiative started meeting with Tamarack Institute, which leads systems-level work in Canada to fight poverty. The tools and processes from that work can be applied to this area in Elkhart County.

Over the last number of months, more than 50 parents have come to listening sessions to help leaders better understand the challenges they face in raising children.

In May, at a quarterly meeting for the Elkhart County Child Dashboard, practitioners learned about the initiative and three action teams quickly formed at that meeting. Those groups have been meeting this summer to discuss:

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• Maternal & Child Health
• Support for Young Families
• High-Quality Childcare & Learning Environments

In support of these initiatives, a larger community gathering is being planned for this autumn to equip community partners as they work together. The event will include reports from the three actions with prioritized opportunities identified. The featured speaker will be Dr. Dana Suskind, a professor of surgery and pediatrics and author who has researched the neuroscience of early child development.

The Community Foundation’s Kids & Families Committee overseeing its Community Investment Grants in that space is in the process of reprioritizing its funding to support these system changes under the umbrella of Building Strong Brains.

The “theory of change” that undergirds this work is that if a system results in children and mothers having positive health outcomes, having access to safe and stimulating environments, and families having access to the things they need to support children’s positive development, then the community’s children will enter kindergarten poised for success.

Yoder believes this is a great opportunity for the community to improve how its children succeed. “I’m very hopeful and excited,” she says. “This is a long game, with a 10-year investment or longer. I think this is our best opportunity to transform our village.”

“This is a long game, with a 10-year investment or longer. I think this is our best opportunity to transform our village.”

– Candy Yoder, Chief Program Officer, Community Foundation

This story appeared in the 2022 Annual Report.