United for Brownsville is proud to announce that we will be part of a new collaboration between the Yale Child Study Center and Scholastic.
The Yale Child Study Center–Scholastic Collaborative for Child & Family Resilience will focus on the intersection of literacy and health across a range of education content areas, with the ultimate goal of improving academic and mental health outcomes for children and their families.
The Collaborative’s goals and methods align well with United for Brownsville’s aim to improve social-emotional and language developmental outcomes for infants and toddlers. Moreover, the Collaborative has recently announced that they will be partnering with UB’s backbone staff and Brownsville-based stakeholders to help ensure the success of “Discover Together: Brownsville.”
“Discover Together: Brownsville” encomposses several cross-sector activities to be jointly planned and launched by UB’s Family Advisory Board and Provider Action Team in 2019. At the heart of these activities is a Family Co-Op inspired by the work of Scholastic, Yale Child Study Center, and local stakeholders in rural Grundy County, TN.
The Family Co-Op will be a drop-in center for young children and their caregivers to access free, high-quality, and fun skill- and community-building activities on weekends. This will establish educational enrichment opportunities within Brownsville on par with paid activities that are already offered in wealthier Brooklyn neighborhoods.
The Family Co-Op will take a multigenerational approach to supporting the literacy and social-emotional development of families with young children in Brownsville. This participatory project will collaborate with members of the local community to foster pride-in-place, relationship-building, and resilience throughout spaces where people live and learn. The Family Co-Op will thus help families to engage in literacy and enjoy healthy lives for themselves and for future generations, and it will help to change negative narratives by celebrating the strengths and assets of the community.
“The power of narrative to support a child’s academic and social development is a longstanding belief at Scholastic and will be a driving force behind the mission of our collaborative with the Yale Child Study Center, which will support our early childhood initiatives globally,” said Greg Worrell, president of Scholastic Education.
“We want to ensure that every child and family has what they need to shape their own stories, reframing adverse circumstances and envisioning the brightest futures imaginable. By connecting literacy and health, and bringing the community into the education experience, children and their families will benefit,” said Worrell.
The research findings that come out of the collaborative will contribute to the creation of resources, programs, professional development, and curriculum for supporting children and families. To learn more about the collaborative, visit its webpage.
Source: https://news.yale.edu/2018/12/11/yale-child-study-center-partner-scholastic-new-literacy-research
