I just arrived back home from spending a long week in Washington D.C. at a wonderful training. This training was offered by “The Program for Infant/Toddler Care” center it is also known as the PITC. While I was there I had the opportunity to talk to other professionals in the early childhood field. I was privileged enough to talk to colleagues that came from other countries and was able to hear how early childhood was similar and different in their country. One colleague was from Ghana, she moved to the United States when she was 16 years old. She talked about how in Ghana there are very rich people and very poor people. She attended school while she was in her home land and she is working towards her Master’s degree. It was a wonderful experience to hear her talk about her home land and things that she missed. I also talked to some that had moved here from Mexico and Central America. They talked about the struggle they had when they were trying to adjust to America. Most of them were bi-lingual and they discussed the difficulty of not having a lot of people talking to them in their home language. They talked about the importance of preserving their culture and teaching their children their home language.
The Podcast that I really found interesting was Episode 6: Meridas Eka Yora.
Meridas Eka Yora is the founder and director of the institution Fajar Hiayah for Islamic Education and Director of the Yayasan Fajar Hidayah Foundation. Meridas developed three boarding schools for children orphaned as a result of that devastation in Aceh.
Aceh, a special territory on the Southern tip of Indonesia, was the closest land to the epicenter of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, in which more than 225 Indonesians were killed and 500,000 left homeless.
Today there are more than 2,000 students, 400 orphans, 300 under privileged children, studying at Fajar Hidayah Group of Schools with 450 teachers and staffs. The Foundation is also a registered NGO with the BRR in Aceh, and UN in Indonesia.
The Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University was founded in 2006 on the belief that the vitality and sustainability of any society depend on the extent to which it expands opportunities early in life for all children to achieve their full potential and engage in responsible and productive citizenship. Drawing on the full breadth of intellectual resources available across Harvard University’s schools and affiliated hospitals, the Center generates, translates, and applies knowledge in the service of improving life outcomes for children in the United States and throughout the world.
Specifically, the Center on the Developing Child is committed to the following four goals:
· Building a multidisciplinary science of health, learning, and behavior to elucidate causal mechanisms that explain the early roots of lifelong impairments in the full range of environments in which children live;
· Advancing our understanding of how to reduce preventable disparities in well-being through the design, implementation, and evaluation of innovative program and practice models in diverse social, economic, cultural, and political contexts;
· Catalyzing the formulation and implementation of effective, science-based policies through strategic relationships and enhanced capacity for knowledge transfer; and
· Preparing future and current leaders to make science-based policy decisions that advance the healthy development of children, families, and communities and bring high returns to societies, in the United States and around the world.
In support of these broad goals, the Center’s recently launched Global Children’s Initiative is focused on three strategic objectives:
· To reframe public discourse about the early childhood period by educating high-level decision-makers about the common underlying science of learning, behavior, and health;
· To support innovative, multidisciplinary research and demonstration projects in selected countries or regions to expand global understanding of how healthy development happens, how it can be derailed, and how to get it back on track; and
· To build leadership capacity in child development research and policy among individuals and institutions in low- and middle-income countries in order to increase the number and influence of diverse perspectives that are contributing to the global movement on behalf of young children.
Guided by these strategic objectives, the Global Children’s Initiative has begun to build a portfolio of activities in three domains: early childhood development; mental health; and children in crisis and conflict situations.
The first priority of the Early Childhood Development area is to adapt the successful work the Center has conducted in the United States for a broader range of strategically selected audiences, in an effort to energize and reframe the global dialogue around investments in the earliest years of life.
To respond to the Mental Health challenge, a working group of Harvard faculty is developing a focused agenda in research, education, and public engagement to address significant gaps in knowledge and service delivery. The following three initial projects have been selected to launch this effort, subject to sufficient funding:
· Assessing the state of child mental health services in China;
· Developing and evaluating family-based strategies to prevent mental health problems in children affected by HIV/AIDS in Rwanda; and
· Addressing child maltreatment and mental health outcomes in three Caribbean nations (Barbados, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and Suriname).
The Global Children’s Initiative is currently exploring potential synergies with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, both of which have extensive experience working in emergency situations across the world. The goal of this effort is to foster interdisciplinary collaboration that incorporates a science-based, developmental perspective into the assessment and management of child well-being in a range of natural and manmade crises, focusing on both immediate circumstances and long-term adaptation. Two issues are the initial focus of activity in this domain:
· Exploring comparable approaches to surveying child status in post-earthquake Haiti and Chile.
· Bringing the science of child development into strategies for addressing acute malnutrition.
References
World Forum Foundation [WFF]. (2011). World Forum Radio: Episode 6: Meridas Eka Yora. Retrieved from: http://www.worldforumfoundation.org/wf/radio.php
