Celebrating Stopping the School-to-Prison Pipeline awardees

On Friday, June 24, representatives and community members involved in local efforts to dismantle the school-to-prison pipeline gathered together for an open house in the spirit of solidarity and to celebrate Best Starts for Kids’ Stopping the School-to-Prison Pipeline strategy awardees. The gathering illustrated a small piece of the both local and national momentum around…

We’re hiring! Prenatal to Five Innovations Lead

Are you passionate about early childhood development and building capacity in community-based organizations? Consider joining our team! Best Starts for Kids is hiring a Prenatal to Five Innovations Lead. The Innovations Lead is responsible for planning and implementing the Innovations strategy,  which supports new and different approaches to serve young children and their families. This…

Announcing Evaluation Awardees 

We’re thrilled to announce four evaluation awardees who will collaborate with our Data & Evaluation Team and partners as we measure and evaluate our efforts, learn and innovate based on our experiences, and ensure the most effective use of public funds.

Innovation RFP Webinar Recordings

For those interested in applying to the Innovation RFP, two webinar recordings are available. The first is an information session on the application requirements and process. The second is presented by our partners at Frontiers of Innovation and the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard, sharing more on the IDEAS Framework and the science behind the support they will provide funded partners.

Bringing the Data Together

This is the fifth and final post in our month-long Community Owned Data series we are doing to highlight our learnings from the Best Starts for Kids Health Survey. We put it all together in this post including an in depth data visualization. If you are interested in the previous posts, we link to them all at the end of this post so make sure you make your way to the end! 

“This is just what young people in North Bend needed”: Celebrating the Trail Youth Coffee House

The Trail Youth Coffee House is open for business! One of 32 Best Starts for Kids Youth Development awardees, the Trail Youth built the coffee house in partnership with Best Starts for Kids to create a safe place for young people in the North Bend area to spend time, be themselves, and connect with supportive adults in the community. Thanks to a surprise feature on the show “Returning the Favor” and community participation, the space was remodeled in just two weeks! Best Starts staff were excited to join the Trail Youth in their Grand Opening Celebration earlier this week. This post is full of feel–good inspiration!

Enseñanzas del Data Dive Latino/a

Each of our eight data dive community meetings were led by community partners and facilitated by members from the particular invited community. Maria Cruz facilitated the conversation during the Latino/a data dive and shares her takeaways in the following audio recording.

Maria Cruz es una facilitadora en nuestra Colaboración de Café en la Comunidad. Ella condujo el grupo para compartir data y sus enseñanzas (con su compañera de equipo en la Colaboración de Café en la Comunidad, Fátima González-Galindo)  

Learning from Listening

This is the third post in a month-long series we are doing to highlight our learnings from the Best Starts for Kids Health Survey. We brought the data to specific communities in the form of “data dives”, asked what they thought, and learned a lot from community input and data interpretation! In this post, we share more about what we heard and learned about these five important topics: Reading, Singing and Telling Stories to Children; Family Resilience; Parent/Caregiver Emotional Support; ACEs; and Thriving Children.

Now Accepting Applications for Innovation Fund RFP–Due August 8

The RFP for the Best Starts for Kids Innovation Fund for Prenatal to Five is now open. Applications are due August 8. Through this RFP, King County will partner with community-based organizations seeking to implement new or adapted approaches to support the health and well-being of pregnant individuals, children aged zero to five and their families, service providers and communities. Learn more here….

Standing for children and families

As a nation, we have confronted head-on a tragedy that transcends politics: our federal government’s decision to separate more than 2,000 children, including babies, from their parents at our southern border. Weeks after implementing this inhumane policy, the President signed an executive order today stating that newly-arrived families would not be separated “where appropriate and…