Creating More Access Quality Child Care in New Jersey

Steve Adubato goes on-location to The Turrell Fund Day for Children in Shelburne, Vermont to talk to Kay Hendon, Senior Program Officer, The Nicholson Foundation, about affordability and accessibility of high quality child care, as well as the importance of developing more childcare facilities across New Jersey.

8/20/19 #2241

Excerpt:

"Hi, I'm Steve Adubato. We're coming to you from beautiful Vermont. To be more specific, we're in Shelburne, Vermont. We are at the Shelburne Farms at a conference This is the Turrell Fund For Children. It's a conference that's held with advocates and caregivers and people who care deeply about infants and toddlers. It's part of our Right From the Start NJ initiative. We're outside here of this beautiful farm. And we're talking to our good friend, Kay Hendon, who is Senior Program Officer, the Nicholson Foundation. And the Nicholson Foundation, in fact, has been supportive of our website, which you'll see throughout this program. Kay, make it clear why this conference, this event, is so important. Well, this is an event sponsored by the Turrell Foundation, as you know, and that's one of our main foundation partners in New Jersey. So that's one reason we wanted to be here. But the other reason we wanted to be here is that Vermont has made these great strides in creating this strong, powerful organization called Let's Grow Kids. Let's Grow Kids? Yeah. That's been really successful in advancing some early childhood programs with the state legislature, and has a major infant/toddler initiative going right now. So we wanted to learn about how they did that, and we wanted to hear about where they are right now with it. So we're very excited about that. And also this conference has a theme of love in early childhood, and we were interested in learning about where that came from and what that had to do with our work. And I think we've learned a lot from it. You know, when Kay mentions love, a lot of that theme, much of that theme about love comes from the work of Fred Rogers. There was a documentary about Mister Rogers. It was seen last night. And I actually saw it a couple times back home in Jersey. Powerful. Important. Significant. Because Fred Rogers was not just an iconic figure, but an important figure when it comes to the development of children and using media to do that. Mm hmm. Kay, what does the theme of love and it's connection to childhood development mean to you? Well today we heard an explanation of that, that I think is a really good one. And that is that early childhood, as well as all of our lives, are really about human relationships. And those are about love. So everything that we look for in an early childhood program, you know, we sometimes get caught up in a lot of rules and regulations, and standards... Policies? Procedures? ...and we want it to be high quality and we've got..."