 Family navigators are a critical part of Oakland’s early childhood ecosystem. They help families find resources to meet basic needs, address barriers in service provision, and understand many different parent perspectives. OSSS recently led a research project focused on how to support family navigators and understand their needs.
Family child care (FCC) providers are business owners, educators, and community leaders, who support working parents and families with home-based holistic care and school readiness for young children. The Oakland / Alameda County Family Child Care (FCC) Policy Program is a group of FCC providers and parents interested in learning about early childhood policy, advocating for FCC providers and their businesses, and strengthening the whole field through connecting with elected officials and early childhood systems partners. OSSS, along with BANANAS and First 5 Alameda County, supports the FCC Policy Program.
For three years now, the planning team for the Oakland Early Learning Symposium has come together to create meaningful opportunities for early learning professionals to explore best practices and learn in community. This year, we wanted to continue to support best practices, while also recognizing the unique circumstances of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.  At the beginning of the 2021-22 school year, preschool teachers and early childhood education (ECE) providers attending our “Let’s Talk Early Learning” informal Zoom event shared that they were seeing more behavioral challenges than usual as children returned to care and school or started in new ECE settings. Given the weight of these challenges, the planning team wanted to provide Oakland early learning professionals with resources and tools in a way that would be both fun and practical.
The planning team chose the topic of “Fostering Early Social-Emotional Learning through Books” for the first symposium event in November. Through a partnership with Tandem, Partners in Early Learning, we provided all symposium attendees with the opportunity to pick up a bag of children’s books, such as Jabari Jumps and Homemade Love, related to social-emotional learning.  Photo courtesy of Parent Voices Oakland Parent Voices Oakland (PVO), in partnership with OSSS, was recently showcased in a national case study for its groundbreaking family-led data collection and advocacy.
Tanisha Payton, Leadership Development and Research Manager with Parent Voices Oakland, and Priya Jagannathan, OSSS Director, were interviewed for a case study: “Parents Know Best: How Family-Led Data Collection and Advocacy Lead to Increases in Early Childhood Funding in Alameda County”. |
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