Getting to Know Your International Contacts-Part 2

For this blog assignment I would like to talk about Global Children's Initiative. There was so much information and it is not an organization I had heard about prior to this class. As I explored the site I did recognize many of its theories from another agency we use in my Head Start program, the Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health program. Devereux uses many of the same thoughts as the Global Children's Initiative although it is focused in the U.S.  only.

Saving Brains

This was an interesting area of the web site. Saving Brains is a partnership led by Grand Challenges Canada and its goal is to improve outcomes for children living in poverty.  The program knows that the first 1000 days of a child's life are extremely important and so their focus is on ensuring a child's brain development is a positive one through proper nutrition and stimulation.  The Saving Brains organization has developed a body of research and practical knowledge to help develop, refine, and evaluate innovative solutions to healthy child development.

Our Kin

This is another organization striving to create equal educational outcomes for those in poverty starting with research to give methods to do better for these children and why. This organizations feels strongly that the best place to start with equality and excellence is with the caregivers themselves, giving them techniques and research-based education. The final step Our Kin uses is a multifaceted partnership with those in the communities such as policy-makers, doctors, educators, etc. Using all aspects of a child's life and community will help deliver a equal and quality education.

Toxic Stress


This area is also focused on in the website and rightly so because there are stressors in everyone's life both good and bad. The more positive stressors are addressed and tend to be those which make us cope better in our environment. The toxic stress this site speaks about is that of war, abuse, neglect, violence, and other negative influences which adversely effect the development of the brain. Children living in this type of environment often fall behind their peers in school and do not have positive relationships in their lives. Studies show that even in the worse environment, if a child has positive relationships they can still develop positively and have resilience to bounce back.

As I stated earlier, there is so many interesting pieces to the Global Children's Initiative website and it gives one hope for a brighter tomorrow.


References


 Devereux Advanced Behavioral Health(2017). Retrieved from http://www.devereux.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ny_index

Global Children's Initiative(2017) Retrieved from http://developingchild.harvard.edu/about/what-we-do/global-work/