Transcript for:

ELI’s Executive Director

The Early Learning Institute was founded in 1999 based on a desire to bring services to the local level. We wanted to focus on the families here in Sonoma County. We wanted to provide service that were creative and fluid and could respond to community needs.

We started with a core early intervention program, of home visiting and group services, and have since expanded into 6 other kinds of services including serving children in foster care, serving children in childcare settings, we serve premature babies, we have an at risk programs, and we have typical community based mommy and me kinds of music and movement classes. So lots of different kids, lots of different kinds of families.

We also started at a time that the brain research for children was showing that intervention for young children as early as possible, and intervention that was focused on the parent-child relationship, was going to be most effective.

The Early Learning Institute offers for parents a place they can call and get almost an immediate response to concerns they might have for their young child. And I think that is what we do best- we soothe the parents without telling lies, we move into “this is what needs to be done, this is how we are going to do it, and we are going to respond quickly. Which is again, being a local agency with a local focus allows us to be flexible around the needs of the family. We can go to them, they can come to us, that means families get what they need when they need it.

So, one of the things I love most about the Early Learning Institute is the team we’ve been able to put together here. We have a large Transdisciplinary staff with lots of different kinds of backgrounds. We have nurses, we have teachers, we have early childhood folks, we have therapists, we have psychologists, so everyone brings to the work a different lense, a different training…but we approach it with a team lense to look at all the different aspects of a family and a child, even if it is a singular home visitor doing the work.

The relationship with the family and the relationship between the parent and the child is critical to the work. It isn’t just about making the child walk, or speak, it’s about making the family see their child as this unique being that is going to make a difference in the world and have a productive life. And our staff, which might be trained in different disciplines and a have a different way of approaching the work…they bring all of these concepts together in a way you can almost viscerally feel the difference in our approach to early intervention from some of our other partners. It is both about the relationship AND the developmental gains.

It is hard to believe it has been 15 years that we have been doing this work. There is still so much to do, and so as an Executive Director my wish is we have this solid financial foundation so that services for children, if they are threatened at the state or threatened at the federal level, we can keep them locally here.

What I wish for parents, as a parent, is that they know about services as early as possible, and that they have the courage to call as soon as possible. We are the agency that says “you might now have a need that fits neatly into this box, or this box, or this services, or this funding stream….but we will still figure out how to help you and your family. We will figure out how to serve you, figure out how to provide a service that is unique and fits your family the best. We are here, and hopefully we are here in the long run.