United Counties of Leeds and Grenville (UCLG)
The United Counties of Leeds and Grenville (UCLG) cover a very large geographical area with the bottom border running along the St. Lawrence River and the American border. The Leeds and Grenville EarlyON CFC is run through the Children’s Services department of UCLG, and serves a collection of rural and suburban villages, towns, and a few smaller, more urbanized areas. To serve this diverse and dispersed area, its EarlyON programs are spread across various locations and partners.
It’s quite a big challenge to deliver programming across such a large geographical area with a small team, and addressing this challenge requires creativity and a willingness to be flexible by the EarlyON staff and its partners.
One partnership that really helps with reaching families is with the local libraries, delivering Play and Learn or Storytime drop-in programs, including on Saturday mornings. The programs are highly attended and very popular, and both the EarlyON and the libraries benefit from families accessing each other’s programs.
Another success the EarlyON has had in bringing the community together is their annual Touch A Truck event, which has been running for over a decade. This free event brings a variety of vehicles to a field for the day for families to climb in and play, as well as hosting community information booths and a children’s activity area. With approximately 1,000 children, parents and caregivers attending each year, the event is a great method for sharing community information and resources with new and existing EarlyON families.
As part of its mandate, the EarlyON prioritizes programs for underserved, vulnerable, or minority populations. They facilitate programs with other community partners, such as social housing and emergency shelter programs, with other agencies that support families with children who have special needs, and with child and family welfare services to provide a more trauma-informed setting for family visitations. In addition, the Leeds and Grenville EarlyON CFC have partnerships or work on regular projects with the UCLG Forestry, Paramedics, Social Housing, and Public Works departments.
The core values of UCLG are Respect, Wellness, Honesty, Accountability, and Innovation and the EarlyON team adheres to these values in the way it runs its programming.
The staff at the Leeds and Grenville EarlyON CFC show respect and practice honesty through their implementation of a judgement-free environment for all families and colleagues. This is particularly important as the team needs to have honest and sometimes difficult conversations with colleagues, community partners, or families regularly in the delivery of its programming. The team purposefully makes it a priority to build strong relationships so that if a tough conversation needs to happen, there is a foundation of trust.
The team uses data for accountability, reviewing its program data quarterly, with everyone taking great pride in their work, sharing their ‘success stories’ during meetings, in staff newsletters, or anecdotally with each other. The team also holds each other accountable when things should be done differently or mistakes are made, but approaches these situations as opportunities to mentor, support, or teach each other rather than place blame.
Lastly, the EarlyON team is highly driven by pedagogy, believing in and practicing Family Systems Theory, which speaks to all members of a family unit being tied together and ensures that holistic family wellbeing is the goal of all EarlyON programs and interactions. This helps the EarlyON team to find innovative ways to help families in need, either providing support, information, or a warm hand-off to a partner. In addition to this pedagogy, the “Forget Me Not” flower, which illustrates the vision for a quality early learning and child care system, is included as a part of the Children’s Services department’s five-year Service Plan for the EarlyON programs to align to in their design and implementation.
The EarlyON team is made up of eight Registered Early Childhood Educators. In addition to being RECEs, the staff each bring their own individual strengths, skills and prior learnings in areas such as music, theatre, outdoor learning, pedagogy, trauma-informed care and Indigenous culture. They also see the value of continuous professional learning and wherever possible, work with local partners to increase their awareness of relevant supports and resources. For instance, asking a local Pride group representative to come to speak at a team meeting on how to ensure the environment is inclusive and welcoming for 2SLGBTQ+ families. Their families notice and are grateful for the staff’s training and knowledge, saying things such as:
A challenge the team is currently navigating is the lack of uptake for parent education workshops and seminars. One approach they are trying that has seen some success is to partner an EarlyON Resource Consultant with a Fee Subsidy Case Manager to present a virtual session on navigating the child care system for families looking to access child care. The team will continue to try more collaborations between internal municipal teams to provide not only more integrated service delivery, but also sessions on topics that are relevant to families.
The current EarlyON team consists of Resource Consultants Su, Judy, Esther, Karen, Ginny, Julie, and Lisa, as well as Program Support, Sandy. With such dedicated and methodical approaches to reaching families and meeting their needs under the leadership of EarlyON Supervisor, Mattea Steacy, the many communities within Leeds and Grenville will always be able to find the EarlyON support and programs they need.
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