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80x3 Podcast Series - Part 1: Early Childhood Budgets, Boards, and Brain Development | Otter.ai

80x3 Podcast Series - Part 1: Early Childhood Budgets, Boards, and Brain Development

Center for Inclusive Child Care29min

Narrator

00:02

Welcome to Inclusion Matters, a podcast about children's development from the Center for Inclusive Child Care.

Priscilla W.

00:19

Welcome to Inclusion Matters, a podcast from the Center for Inclusive Child Care. I'm Priscilla Weigel, the Executive Director and I am here today with three amazing guests to have a conversation that I think all of us need to be focused on in the field of early childhood. I am going to jump in with some of the bios of our guests this morning. But, before I do that, I just want to thank the 80x3 Initiative from Greater Twin Cities United Way that has pulled this group together and allowed us to spend some time together talking about this topic. We are going to have a three part series, so look forward to other episodes once you listen to this one. Our first guest is Amanda Ziebell Mawanda. Amanda believes in the power of relationships and the ability of our communities to solve the most pressing challenges we face. She's had over a decade of experience consulting with nonprofits, faith based groups, schools, and governmental agencies around organizational leadership, health and strategy and network development. Amanda enjoys working with clients who are committed to making a difference in their communities, and she is passionate about building common vision, igniting creativity and unleashing energy for positive change. As a doctoral candidate, her research focuses on transformational leadership practices, and learning communities. She lives in the Corcoran neighborhood of Minneapolis where she grows and preserves food from her community garden plot, reads poetry, cooks delicious meals for those she loves, and creates beautiful pieces of origami. Next, we have Art Rolnick, who is an economist who's been on the faculty of the University of Minnesota since 2010. He previously served as co director of the Human Capital Research collaborative at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota and before that worked for 40 years at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis as a senior vice president and director of research. Art's main expertise is pre Civil War banking, but he is well known for his decades of work in early childhood, and especially the Minnesota early learning scholarships program, which he launched 20 years ago in Minneapolis. His work on early childhood development has garnered numerous awards, including those from the George Lucas Educational Foundation, and the Minnesota Department of Health, both in 2007. He also was named 2005 Minnesotan of the Year by Minnesota Monthly magazine. We also have Jaime Bonczyk, who is a leader in early childhood education who strives to create social impact networks, change initiatives and partnerships that create sustainable health and education outcomes for children, families and educators. Her background includes roles as an executive director of an early learning nonprofit Headstart administrator, adjunct instructor, author, professional development content creator and preschool teacher. Jamie has a bachelor's degree from Minnesota State University Moorhead, and a master's degree from Roosevelt University, both in early childhood education. She's completed a headstart management fellowship at UCLA, and an early childhood policy fellowship at the Bank Street College of Education. Additionally, she became a certified professional project manager through the University of St. Thomas. Jamie and her family call Richfield home. They love to play games, travel, and play with their dog. A natural storyteller with the love of humor, Jamie can occasionally be found on the stage of the Strike Theater. For self care, Jamie has regular yoga and meditation practices. Welcome all of you to Inclusion Matters. I'm so glad you're here. And today we're going to be talking about early childhood budgets, boards and brain development. And those things are deeply connected, and sometimes that connection is forgotten. And so Jamie, can you just start us out with helping us understand how do budgeting decisions in the early childhood education sector translate to positive brain development in young children?

Jamie B.

04:21

Thank you for the question, Priscilla. So glad to be here with all of you. I think you know, just to get it started, put simply, brain positive brain development comes from healthy relationships with active caretakers and play partners. But it's not so simple to learn everything you need to do to create those healthy relationships and do those with ease and joy. And when I think about the connection between a budget and positive brain development in a classroom setting, I really think about some things like educators and recruiting. Like who are we looking for to be these relationship partners and play partners is somebody who is thinking about that a child is a whole person. And they have physical development needs and social development needs, and language development needs, and cognitive needs and creative development, all these things, and that each child differs one child differs from another person so you might have to use different approaches, and especially that we want to think about the intersection between like language and culture and family homes and how that brings people to our classrooms. And then how do we keep them there, because educators need to be invested in, they need professional development that needs to meet their needs, meet them where they are, they need wages and benefits, like health insurance and retirement, that's going to keep them in the field, but also allow for them to take care of their own families. And then we have to be able to also think about our budgets, meeting our mission, if that includes supporting families. So it's your budget to me is your, your values document, right? And so if we have a mission, and we have a value to meet the mission, what are we able and willing to do to put our money where our mouth is, and I think that that is much harder when we think about human centered work, then we've really given it a lot of thought we say like, okay, it's, it's really important, we care about kids, how are we going to do it, and who are those people. I think sometimes we leave out the who are those people, and how do we help them meet their needs. Because in my experience, early childhood education and care is always a two generation approach. Even if you're not saying the words two gen approach, it absolutely is because children do not arrive to any kind of early childhood education, preschool setting, in isolation. And that was the quality of those relationships that they have with their caretakers, whether they are their own family members, or if they are, you know, educators working in an environment, those, the quality of those relationships and what those educators know about developing intentional relationships and facilitating like really inclusive play. It's a, it's a skill as a former preschool teacher, everything I learned how to do, you gave me a beautiful introduction, social network weaver, all these things. I was a classroom teacher for 10 years. And for 10 years, I followed 20 preschool children, and looked at what do they what do they want to learn about? How am I going to teach it to them? And I had to figure out, how do you get all these different young people to make it through 10 hours of a day together. That's a lot of practice. So, you know, what I would say is, we have got to look at who are the people we want in our classroom? How long do we want them to stay there for so they can, you know, build those relationships. And what is it going to take for our budget to look like that's what we're doing.

Priscilla W.

08:02

Which leads me to a question to you, Amanda, because, you know, this is really what your work is built around. First of all, the relationships and how sustaining those and cultivating those can really change the face of success for nonprofits. But how do you help nonprofits budget to advance their mission? Because early childhood education and the field of early childhood, so often, as Jamie said, you know, we're out there focusing on early childhood, children, their development, their social, emotional, the business side of things can so often be overwhelming, and forgotten. And that's the foundational essential. So how do you help folks understand that better?

Amanda

08:50

Yeah, thank you for the question. So over the last couple of years in my work life, working with nonprofits, I've had the chance to work with several several nonprofit childcare providers. I think there are some unique things there about the budgeting process. But before I get into that, I want to say like when Jamie was talking, the first note that I have here is that budgets are values statements. Yes. So that rings really true with me. Whatever ends up in the budget, is what you are putting your focus and your resources behind. So the first thing for me when it comes to a budgeting process, has actually nothing to do with money. It's about is there clarity about the mission? And does everyone understand the mission the same way. So a lot of the programs that I've worked with are embedded in a larger nonprofit, are not, not necessarily their own standalone 501 C three, but they might be a program of a larger nonprofit. They might be embedded in a faith community. And so sometimes the question needs to be before we even talk about money is what is the, what is the mission as we all share that understanding in the organization. Has it shifted? Does it need to shift? And is it still meeting the community's needs and the organization's needs. So sometimes, having a child early childhood program is a great fit for an organization. And sometimes it's an add on or a legacy program that isn't getting the resources that they need to do the work well, because it's not fully integrated into the mission of the organization. For me, like the first question is, are we all on the same page about how this early childhood program functions within the larger organization to meet the mission? And do we understand that mission the right way. Once we're having a shared understanding of the importance of that program, then I think a piece that often gets missed is any input from the people actually doing the work. And they're the ones who know, what does it take to actually get the work done. I sort of think about it at kind of a programmatic level, operational level, or organizational level. So at the programmatic level, that's the day to day work, what do teachers need to be able to do and who do they need to be in order to show up in the classroom. And there are implications around how you fund PTO, how you fund benefits, how you fund programming at your school, what else? What other supplemental things do you fund and bring into your program. So asking those programmatic people first, what do you need to do what we're asking you to do? And then as that moves up, operationally, what supports need to exist for that to be successful. So then you're adding in the administrative costs, you're adding in space costs, you're adding in sort of what we would maybe call general ops, or general operations propel, we like to say, core mission support. And then at the organizational level, how is the whole organization supporting that work at the programmatic level and providing the needed resources at the operations level. And I think that's where you can get into the conversations about sort of the trade off between where your budget line is going, what's going where, who's paying for what, where are we going to find the money to do it, but it has to start first at the programmatic level. And then what do people on the ground need? What do people in the classroom need? How do we support that operationally, and then organizationally, what does that mean for what we need to do to stay healthy and vital. And I think that, in my mind, that's a great budgeting process. The only other thing I would say, is that start much earlier on your budgeting process than you think you need to. Because if you're going to have those conversations, realistically, you probably need to back up your budgeting process, so that you're beginning work on your budget, you know, at least four months out from when the board is going to approve it. Because that gives you a time to have those conversations and include everybody who needs to be included in the conversation. Truly.

Priscilla W.

13:27

Yeah. And when you think about the the nonprofits out there, those are the sites providing care to children and families who are doing it well, all those things you've described are in place and continually re evaluated. I think that that was really, you know, that point really struck me, too. And feedback is being gathered by the folks who are actually doing the work input from them to say, what do you need? Now? Maybe you didn't need that 10 years ago. But today, what do you all need to be successful to meet the needs of the children that you're serving each day and the families? And so from an economic point of view Art, why is it important that everybody understands this investment? Not just the people in the organizations, but the whole community. All of us.

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