TMW Center Newsletter August 2022

Dana Suskind at Aspen Ideas Health!

TMW Center Co-Director Dana Suskind was invited to Aspen Ideas: Health at the end of June to speak on a panel titled, “Supporting Parents, Nurturing Kids.” Aspen Ideas: Health is an offshoot of Aspen Ideas Festival, with an emphasis on innovations in health, medicine, and science. Dana was joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jennifer Senior and epidemiologist/New York University professor Bonnie Kerker for a robust and illuminating conversation on the role that early childhood development plays in school readiness, social-emotional skills, and children’s long-term health and wellbeing. “How we support parents is critical to allowing children to reach the promise of their promise,” Dana told the assembled crowd. You can watch the full discussion here.

And in Australia

In July, Dana and TMW Center co-director John List traveled to Australia to join University of Melbourne Professor Sharon Goldfield for a panel discussion on Research in Early Education: Statistical Measurement and Policy Implications. (As Dana and John like to say, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t move it.”) The panel took place at Australian National University, as part of the 2022 SAET (Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory) Conference. The beginnings of an exciting, intercontinental friendship!

Dana and John will each squeeze in a few more destinations before summer ends, delivering keynote addresses, lecturing and leading conference discussions around their respective books, “Parent Nation: Unlocking Every Child’s Potential, Fulfilling Society’s Promise” and “The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale.”

PNC Grant

We’re thrilled to announce the continuation of our partnership with PNC Foundation, which began in 2014 with a $3 million grant to support a five-year study of TMW Home Visiting, a program designed to help parents build their children’s school readiness.

In 2019, the PNC Foundation announced a $3.3 million grant to the TMW Center to launch Any Time is 3Ts Time/Siempre es Hora para las 3Cs, a program designed to share 3Ts/3Cs resources with parents, caregivers and community organizations, empowering them with knowledge and skills to enhance infants’ and toddlers’ cognitive development. Following the successful 2020 program launch and engagement with hundreds of community organizations and thousands of families across the county, the PNC Foundation awarded a $2.25 million grant to support the continued growth and development of Any Time is 3Ts Time/Siempre es Hora para las 3Cs. The grant is supported through PNC Grow Up Great®, a bilingual $500 million, multi-year initiative to help prepare children from birth to age 5 for success in school and life.

Any Time is 3Ts Time/Siempre es Hora para las 3Cs provides online, print and in-person resources to parents and caregivers through a network of community partners, particularly in underserved neighborhoods. The free, easy-to-use resources on the3Ts.org (for parents and caregivers) and partners.the3Ts.org (for community organizations) are all available in both English and Spanish. Through 2024, the TMW Center plans to add more support for different community members, such as volunteers, center-based and home-based educators, and FFN (family, friend and neighbor) caregivers.

In several 3Ts communities, organizations and families are also participating in Let’s Talk/Conversemos, a parent group program designed for deeper 3Ts engagement. In this program, personalized coaching and weekly online sessions harness the social capital that results from individuals learning alongside one another. Let’s Talk/Conversemos was piloted in Chicago, St. Louis, Dallas, Lexington, Houston and Phoenix in 2020-2021, and will continue in some of those cities in 2022-2024 while also expanding to new cities.

From 2022 to 2024, the TMW Center aims to build upon the successes and findings by providing community partners with opportunities and support for integrating all campaign components more deeply into their work with families. The TMW Center anticipates that this new three-year investment will enable the 3Ts to reach thousands of additional families and hundreds of additional organizations and volunteers, with participation in the majority of PNC Grow Up Great markets. Beyond this three-year period, participating organizations across the country will continue to leverage the 3Ts expertise of their staff members, 3Ts awareness in their communities developed through family participation, and 3Ts resources tailored to their context with support from the TMW Center. In this way, organizations will reach a growing number of families for years to come!

More

Read the rest of the August 2022 newsletter here.