I have chosen to focus on the International Step by Step Association (ISSA), http://www.issa.nl/. I learned from the information on the website that this organization works to connect early childhood professionals and programs while promoting “equal access to quality education and care for all children, especially in the early years of their lives.” Its focus is on providing educational services and advocacy tools for children and families, especially those ages birth through primary school. Although ISSA is a global organization, its “core members are the 29 nongovernmental organizations, located primarily in Central/Eastern Europe and Central Asia.” (ISSA, 2011).
The ISSA website does not have a weekly newsletter, but it does have a newsletter: ISSA Newsletter. I looked at its most current newsletter, Winter 2010-2011 and chose to read the article “Interview with Hea Algus, Estonia on Home Visiting." I chose to read this article and look at the topic of home visits because we have been talking about home visits and how changing demographics affect them so I was interested in another perspective.
The Family Visiting Program of Hea Algus is an Estonian program that reaches out to at-risk families through weekly visits with individual families and monthly activities for all families in the program. (Hea Algus is the program in Estonia that is associated with ISSA.) The interview was conducted with Liivi Türbsal, Executive Director of Hea Algus and she talks about how the need for the program’s home visits “came from the concern that there were many families in Tartu in which the parents lacked the skills and knowledge to develop and interact with their children and create a supportive environment for them.” (ISSA Newsletter, 2010- 2011).
The part that struck me as most relevant to this week’s topic is how the program restructured due to the needs of the community’s changing demographics. It was founded in 1997 but began to work solely with at-risk families in 2000 and then expanded to meet the needs of families with children birth-7 years rather than birth-3 years (ISSA Newsletter, 2010- 2011). This gave me a new angle to think about for the issue of changing demographics: it’s may not just be the diversity of languages and cultures that are changing; changing demographics also encompasses socioeconomic statuses and age groups too.
Reading about the Family Visiting Program of Hea Algus was really interesting and I saw that it had the same goals as home visiting programs here in the US do: to support child development through educating parents. We have been talking about how family visitors should reflect the populations that they are serving; the family visitors in the Hea Algus program have backgrounds in "medicine, special education, speech and language therapy, social work, or psychology" plus additional training (ISSA Newsletter, 2010-2011). Having a wide range of fields involved probably helps meet the needs of the families the program serves.
Here is the link to the Hea Algus website if you are interested, I found it really informative and it has information on its home visiting program (you may have to translate it though!): http://www.heaalgus.ee/.
References:
International Step by Step Association (ISSA). (2011). Retrieved from:
ISSA Newsletter. (Winter 2010-2011). Retrieved from ISSA website:
I just read part of the newsletter from the Step by Step Assoc. Home visiting is a subject of interest to me because this was one of my favorite jobs in my career as an early childhood professional. It seems that the home visiting program is something some of the parents are really taking advantage of. Some benefits such as their children having the opportunity to make new playmates may not have been one of the outcomes, but I think it is pretty cool. I also found it interesting that of all the people mentioned as part of the field workers, there were no early childhood professionals. Maybe the special education professionals were early childhood professionals as well. Thanks for the good information!
ReplyDeleteGood Job... I strongly agree with everything you have posted here. I went to some of the sites you listed and they were very appealing and interesting to Early Childhood Professionals.
ReplyDeleteJennifer,
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your post, I checked out the website because I am really impressed with what said about the site.You really took your time to post what the site is all about. It is very informative and educative for Early childhood professionals. It will help us in partnering with the families.
Olufemi