Location of Messaging: Statewide
The Family-Friendly Workplace Toolkit highlights best practices and the components of a family-friendly workplace. It includes messaging catered to business leaders around the role they play in child development and economic prosperity. Also includes language around how family-friendly business practices promote positive parenting practices.
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By David Shapiro & Giorgianna Venetis
Employers play a critical role in the lives of their employees, after all, the average person in the United Sates spends 8.9 hours a day at work in comparison to 1.2 hours they spend caring for others.[1] Employees, in every stage of life, should feel supported in the workplace. It is for that reason that partners in Colorado are teaming up to better understand family-friendly workplace policies and practices.
EPIC (Executives Partnering to Invest in Children), Essentials for Childhood (EfC) and Health Links have formed a strategic alliance to lead Colorado’s conversation about family-friendly employers. In June 2016, this alliance launched two initiatives to understand and strengthen family-friendly employment practices:
Business engagement has been a mainstay at EPIC since 2013 when the organization launched Colorado Business Reads, a corporate book drive that delivers books to children and families for summer reading while promoting the importance of language development and early literacy to employers. The success of the book drive led to EPIC’s Lunch & Learn Series and even further to EPIC leading Colorado’s discussion around family-friendly workplace culture.
Safe, stable, nurturing relationships and environments are essential to prevent child abuse and neglect and to assure all children reach their full potential. Essentials for Childhood (EfC) proposes strategies to promote relationships and environments that help children grow up to be healthy and productive citizens. Family-friendly employers are one of four key strategies in Colorado’s EfC Framework.
Healthy and safe employees are the key to success for any business – and for the overall economy. Health Links mission is to simplify how worksite health and safety get done. By doing so, Health Links helps build healthy, vibrant businesses and a stronger local economy. Health Links is a nonprofit initiative spearheaded by health and safety experts at the Center for Health, Work and Environment within the Colorado School of Public Health.
The early childhood sector can also benefit from incorporating family-friendly workplace policies and practices. We encourage you to take the Family-Friendly Assessment and utilize the resources and coaching that come along with it. Additionally, you can read more about what other organizations are doing on the Family-Friendly Workplace Toolkit which is available on the Early Childhood Colorado Partnership website. Together we can work to reduce work-life stress and ensure that employees with young children feel supported.
[1] U.S. Dept. of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics. Time Use on Work Days, 2014.
Location of messaging: East Denver
East5ide Unified is a project of the national BUILD Health Challenge. It is a community-driven effort to ensure all children in five East Denver neighborhoods are valued, healthy and thriving by leveling the playing field before they start school. (Cole, Clayton, Five Points, Whittier, and Skyland).
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This project incorporates messaging throughout efforts, including template messages for all communications based on the Shared Message Bank, reaching multiple audiences.
By Hanna Nichols, The Civic Canopy
Parenting can be the most rewarding experience of one’s life, and it is also likely the most challenging. Having a career devoted to collaborative efforts supporting the needs of children and families, I know the powerful impact parents and caregivers have on children and the importance of working together to ensure families can thrive. But this desire and understanding became a much bigger reality when I became pregnant with my daughter Nora, born earlier this year. With 64 percent of children under the age of 6 with both parents in the workforce[i] and the United States being the only advanced country not to mandate any paid leave for new parents[ii], we can do more to ensure families are supported and children can thrive.
Even as someone armed with an array of resources and copious amounts of support through family, friends, and colleagues, navigating the world of pregnancy and raising a child is harder than I ever could have imagined. Receiving pre- and post-natal care, organizing leave from work, finding child care, and how it all plays into scheduling and finances adds a large burden to the everyday experience of caring for a newborn.
Every family deserves the ability to make the choices they need for themselves, but not all families have the opportunity of choice afforded to them. Many are overextended and struggle to make ends meet. I work in an incredibly supportive workplace that provided me with three months of leave, lactation accommodations, and a part-time position to return to so I can spend valuable time with my daughter. I have family nearby, which means I have the choice to use consistent Family, Friend, and Neighbor child care without a financial burden and have the comfort of knowing Nora gets to build strong relationships with family members who have tools and resources to ensure she receives nurturing experiences every day. The reality is that most families in Colorado are not in the same position with flexible work policies and child care options. In fact, 14 percent of Coloradans reported child care issues affected their employment in 2011-2012 [iii].
It’s exciting to see issues around family friendly workplace policies gain support nationwide, and to see early childhood partners working together to identify ways we can better support families in Colorado. To learn more about how you can get involved, take a look at the Family Friendly Workplace toolkit on the Early Childhood Colorado Partnership website, and make sure to keep an eye out for the next blog post later this month from partners with Essentials for Childhood and EPIC, highlighting how partners can use this toolkit and engage in supporting workplaces to meet the needs of families to create a more prosperous future for Colorado.
[i] U.S. Census Bureau, 2015 American Community Survey 1-year estimates.
[ii] Livingston, G. Among 41 Nations, U.S. is the outlier when it comes to paid parental leave. (2016). Pew Research Center.
[iii] Child Trends analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2014, reported in KIDS COUNT Data Center. Annie E. Casey Foundation.
by Stephanie Monahan, The Civic Canopy
Achieving the vision of the Early Childhood Colorado Framework that all Colorado children are valued, healthy, and thriving is no small task and it can’t be done by any one individual or organization alone. In order to realize this important vision, we all must work together with and on behalf of children and families. Identifying shared priorities, ensuring all important voices are included at the table, and tracking progress over time. And Colorado is seeing real progress in so many areas but in particular around communications and messaging, with countless passionate people coming to the table to share their energy and work tirelessly to achieve this shared vision.
The power of many coming together to spark change has never been more evident for the Partnership than with our work on the Shared Message Platform. Focused on promoting child, family, and community resilience, the shared message bank includes messaging for early childhood stakeholders to use across the state in order to speak from a collective voice, engage more audiences and mobilize action to address early adversity and toxic stress to augment social norms and shift systems and change policy and investments. What makes it amazing to us is that these messages and the accompanying resources aren’t “owned” by any organization or entity, but rather, brought together by many stakeholders under the umbrella of the Early Childhood Colorado Partnership to develop a message bank that can be used freely by anyone and everyone across our state.
In addition to the message bank being available to everyone, it can be adapted to match the unique strengths and challenges of communities statewide. Rather than a script where everyone across our state is saying the same thing, it provides a “songbook,” so to speak, where we are all singing the same tune, but in tones that best meet our needs.
How are you using the message bank, and what wheels are turning in your head? We want to hear who is using it and how it’s been effective for you! Visit the Campaign Map on our website to see how others are using the Messaging Platform and share your own community’s work as well.
The Early Childhood Colorado Partnership works to bring together diverse voices in Colorado’s early childhood landscape. This new blog feature will serve as a platform to dive deep into our efforts and focus areas, including highlighting partner voices. Each month will include blog posts on a specific topic, starting with the Shared Message bank in October. Keep an eye out for a post by Stephanie Monahan from The Civic Canopy on Monday, October 31st.
If you want to share your story or know someone who should share their story via our blog, email earlychildhood@civiccanopy.org.
Children’s Colorado is aligning with numerous state initiatives and efforts by prioritizing children and families through community partnerships and primary care collaboration. The First 1,000 Days effort has incorporated shared messaging throughout the campaign in all outreach and publications.
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The Early Childhood Colorado Partnership (ECCP) was so successful in 2015, thanks to the over 600 members working diligently every day to ensure that all Colorado children are valued, healthy and thriving. Learn more about the accomplishments of the network and how you can continue to participate and support in this annual report.
Congratulations to the Partnership’s 15 The Raising of America Mini-Grantees on hosting over 25 successful screenings across the state including almost 1,000 people! These events and conversations were clearly influential in supporting dialogue around the needs of children and families in Colorado. This report includes highlights of successes, barriers, and recommendations for the Partnership and other partners promoting the documentary series.