Month: January 2023

Ready for School, Ready for Life receives Pritzker Children’s Initiative Grant

(Greensboro, N.C., January 27, 2023) – Ready for School, Ready for Life (Ready Ready) has received a $50,000 grant from Pritzker Children’s Initiative. The grant will create a plan to share Ready Ready’s core approaches, strategies, and lessons learned with other North Carolina communities and states developing a comprehensive prenatal-to-three system.

“While Ready Ready is building a system of care for young children and their families in Guilford County, we have always planned to share our unique work and impact across North Carolina. It’s a population-level change movement that started in Guilford County but won’t end here,” Ready Ready CEO Charrise Hart said. “We are so grateful that Pritzker Children’s Initiative will enable more communities to create a comprehensive and high-quality prenatal-to-three system.”

Research shows that 80 percent of a child’s brain grows during their first three years of life, with a million neural connections forming every second. Creating a strong brain foundation in the first 2,000 days of a child’s life — from birth to kindergarten — is critical to emotional, physical, and cognitive well-being.

“Every child deserves a great start in life, but not every child starts from the same place,” Hart said. “Ready Ready wants every child born in Guilford County 2023 and beyond to have the resources their families need to thrive.”

By partnering with families through the critical early stages of childhood, Ready Ready and its community partners seek to understand and address the systemic challenges that impact families in our community, supporting young children’s early cognitive, emotional, and behavioral development.

These resources supplement the care provided by medical practitioners, address gaps in healthy childhood environments, and add support beyond the love and attention of primary caregivers.

Media contact: Director of Communications Stephanie Skordas — stephanies@getreadyguilford.org

Partner Spotlight: Thriving at Three

Thriving at Three, a program of the Center for New North Carolinians, assures that Latino/Hispanic immigrant children in Greensboro have a positive and strong foundation from birth to age three.

“We want to assure that these families have the help and support they need to help their children develop healthy and positively,” said Thriving at Three Coordinator Grecia Navarro. “We offer home visits, case management, parent education, and group meetings, and we can also refer families to other programs and organizations as needed.”

Three children playing in a daycare settingThriving at Three works with about 40 families each year, assessing their children’s developmental status with the Ages & Stages Questionnaire. Some parents receive the Crianza con Cariño Curriculum to increase their knowledge of child development and parent-child interaction.

“We recognize that if we provide developmental, emotional, and social support early in a child’s life, it will create a long impact to help the child do well in school and in life,” Navarro said.

Thriving at Three is part of Ready for School, Ready for Life’s Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Cohort II. Navarro and another team member began the work with Ready Ready in fall 2022.

“CQI has definitely helped me visualize the changes and improvements I’m able to make for our program to ensure that we are providing the best quality and work for our participating families. Having the time to reflect and evaluate our program helps us recognize our strengths and weaknesses,” Navarro said.

Navarro said another takeaway from the CQI process is examining how Thriving at Three collects data and what kind of data it needs in order to grow and improve. “It’s definitely very impactful and beneficial.”