Community Outreach Education
Name of Coalition: Winona Early Childhood Initiative
MIF: Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation,
Project Overview: We have taken a relationship-based approach to working with community sectors not already involved with early childhood issues, namely, business and civic leaders. By relationship-based we mean that we simply ask individuals to spend some time getting to know and understand what the ECI is all about, and we do the same in return. We believe that giving leaders the opportunity to see that we are reliable, knowledgeable, and willing to listen will serve us well in the future. We started this approach with our Leadership Lunch. We invite small groups of community leaders to a meal to introduce the ECI and explain how early childhood issues impact their sector. We ask participants to fill out a questionnaire at the end of the lunch to let us know what information they would like to know about early childhood in our community and how we might help them get questions answered. We have also worked hard to develop a relationship with our local media. We invited the editor of one of our local papers to be a member of our leadership team and have kept our local education reporter updated, with phone calls and press releases, about our efforts. Finally, we stayed upbeat when we didn’t immediately find a business “champion” to talk up our cause to the business sector.
Cost of Project:
# of Children 0-5 Served: 0
# of Children 6-18 Served: 0
# of Adults Served: 0
# Families Served: 0
Lessons Learned/Outcomes: The Winona Chamber of Commerce President attended our Leadership Lunch. She encouraged us to streamline our message and stay in touch, which we did. As a result, we were invited to a Chamber luncheon on workplace flexibility. The speaker at the luncheon was Patricia J. Kempthorne, from the Twiga Foundation, who shared the When Work Works program. Her main message was that workplace flexibility gives today’s businesses a competitive edge in attracting and holding on to quality employees. This was the perfect backdrop for our quality childcare message and the forum gave us an opportunity to speak about early childhood issues and their impact on the workplace to a room full of business leaders, and to network with these leaders after the luncheon. Indeed, we connected with a human resource director for one of our manufacturing firms and the owner of a business consulting company who are both interested in working with the ECI on workplace/childcare issues. Our next step is to work with them to bring more business leaders into the conversation and developing a common goal that can be attained by joint efforts of the business community and the ECI. Our newspaper editor, who also attended this luncheon, wrote a fabulous editorial linking quality early childhood care with the Winona ECI and Chamber of Commerce initiatives on workplace flexibility. This type of media coverage is infinitely more valuable than a one-time article on our projects, because it promotes the understanding that early childhood issues are an integral part of community development. While this understanding has not yet yielded immediate financial results for our ECI, such as a donation to a project, we feel that we have begun to build a “savings account” for the future. We’ll keep ya posted!
Project Frequency: