An Expanded Vision - Parent-Child Development Centers

The Nurturing System expands the vision of the existing early childcare and education network, which focuses almost exclusively on the child, into a national network of neighbored based Parent-Child Development Centers (PCDC) where, in addition to quality child development, parents and the people who care for children discover and practice the art of mentoring the next generation.

How Does It Work?
The Nurturing System provides the model, resources and staff development needed for existing childcare and education programs to be as successful in parent development as they are with child development, something many attempt to do with varying degrees of success.

Why? Because providers were never trained, nor do they have the system, support or resources to deal successfully with parents. Their focus has been the child. Both however, the parent and child, are equal factors in the human development equation.

The Nurturing System provides the model, training and local support and the resources needed balances the equation, at no cost to parents or providers.

Step one: Existing childcare and education programs apply to the Nurturing Project and expand their vision to include parent development as a critical, non-optional component of their program.

Step two: A staff member at each center becomes the Parent-Child Development Coordinator who is paid to attend three-hour regional training with other coordinators in their community. At these meetings, scheduled every six-weeks, coordinators experience and are trained in the use of an expanding collection of staff and parent development resources. These resources include the latest science, best practices, stress management, nonviolent communication and practical peer-mentored dialogue skills and processes.

Step three: Having shared and experiences how to use these resources coordinators schedule similar meetings at their local center where they model what was learned with parents and staff.

Locally Funded and Administered
The support needed to fund a local Parent-Child Development Center is $2,200 per year. Of this $1,000 will fund staff participation and development and $1,200 will provide onsite resources and training for the first full year.

Local nonprofit organizations such as the YMCA or United Way serve as regional hubs. Universities will collaborate, monitoring and evaluation each pilot region.
During the first year a paid regional administrator will serve as a turn-key consultant developing the project in collaboration with the regional nonprofit hub, the YMCA for example.

The same regional administrator will assist PCDC coordinators in reaching and involving a local civic organization, bank, or business to sponsor their center. Beginning the second and subsequent years these sponsors will donate $2,200 to their local YMCA or United Way to support their adopted center.

Initial funding foundations will be invited to expand the scope of the region by piloting a different group of ten to twenty Parent-Child Development Centers the second year. This cycle is repeated until the need and success of the program is self sustaining and local sponsors apply and are matched needy centers, which is expected to occur the third year.