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Communities for Kids Initiative

            The Communities for Kids (C4K) initiative was created in response to community requests for assistance with shortages of high-quality early care and education programs — shortages that both impact children’s optimal development and pose a challenge for communities hoping to attract and retain the viable workforce they need to thrive.

            The C4K initiative aims to partner with communities’ public and private entities to support and coordinate planning for access to high-quality early care and education for all children birth through age five. These partnerships will be customized to address each community’s unique assets and needs—so each community can grow and prosper well into the future.

 

News & Notes

The Valley Child Development Center opened in the farming community of Red Cloud in 2018. The Center quickly found a niche when a board member’s niece, Bri and her husband Bruce, who lived in California, learned of the Edible Schoolyard, a program developed by food activist and chef Alice Waters to offer “students experiential learning opportunities that deepen their relationship with food, facilitate learning the skills of cooking and gardening” (edibleschoolyard.org).

Marin Johnson and Ja’Nae Smith are two young people who grew up in Omaha and found themselves thrust into independence without the family supports that make the transition easier. As Smith put it, “it’s hard when you don’t have that parental support system.” Had it not been for their discovery of Project Everlast, their journey to adulting might have been quite different.

Earlier in October, Nebraska Children had the privilege of hosting Changemakers, an annual gathering to celebrate the positive impacts happening throughout Nebraska.

“Women tend to laugh more and live longer than men,” says the woman on the stage. She’s gray-haired, bespectacled. She looks like a grandmother or a principal, and indeed she was an educator in the past. She moves away from