Sample Proposal Language
for Growing Great Kids™

To assist sites in seeking funding for the Growing Great Kids™ curriculum, Great Kids, Inc. has provided a proposal outline that is easily adaptable for submission to local or state/provincial organizations, businesses, foundations or civic groups. Funding of the Growing Great Kids curriculum is a "one time investment that will impact a child's life for decades to come."

The language offered below is not meant to be a complete proposal or to be used in its entirety. Rather, it provides information that might enhance various sections of a proposal. You are welcome to adapt and condense the information as appropriate for your needs.

Because we know that the approach to specific funders may vary considerably, we have included as an addendum some information to assist you in linking a comprehensive curriculum like GGK to information from the widely acclaimed "Ghosts in the Nursery" by Robin Karr Morse and Meredith Wiley (The Atlantic Press, 1997). For more research related proposals, we include information to help integrate findings in "The Future of Children Spring/Summer 1999, Home Visiting: Recent Program Evaluations" report of The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. This report examined common issues that are faced in home visiting programs across the country. Where applicable, these national perspectives might enhance the case you are making to particular funders.

Since many organizations have prioritized serving children, with a focus on supporting their emotional, physical and cognitive development, thus preparing children for school, the following list is offered as possible sources for funding.

Local and State/Provincial Organizations:
Junior League
Kiwanis
Rotary Club
Lions Club
Optimist Club
Woman's Business and Professional Association
University Women
Sorority Chapters
Children's Trust Fund
Local or State/Provincial Child Abuse Prevention Councils
United Way
Human Services
Community Development Block Grant (HUD)
Local Businesses such as Target, Wal-Mart, Banks
Local or State/Provincial Foundations

We recognize that the attached proposal language by no means responds to all questions that funders may want answered in a full proposal. We do, however, hope this information is useful for your fundraising efforts, and your efforts to support your staff and families. For further information, or if you have any questions about the Growing Great Kids Prenatal to Age 3 Curriculum, please call Kathy Flanagan at 808-739-0198.

1. Need

   Most curricula used in the early childhood and parenting field today focus primarily on sharing information about basic care and child development. In our experience, the Growing Great Kids Prenatal to Age 3 Parenting Curriculum is the only curriculum which focuses more broadly on sharing this information within the context of fostering positive parent-child relationships while also guiding home visitors in their efforts to provide strength-based support to families.

   Among early childhood home visitation and parenting programs, one of the biggest challenges for home visitors and supervisors is to create individual well-sequenced plans for each family in their caseloads on a weekly (enter your home visit or group frequency here) basis. The Growing Great Kids Curriculum (GGK) offers an excellent opportunity for our program to ensure that our home visits or parenting groups remain fresh, interesting, and relevant to parents over time.

   (Enter additional need statements based on the unique issues in your own community.)

2. Proposed Solution:

   [Program] proposes to further build our supervisory and staff skills and to enhance our ability to provide comprehensive, strength-based support to the families in our program by integrating the Growing Great Kids Prenatal to Age 3 Parenting Curriculum (GGK) into our services. We believe that using GGK will allow us to effectively address the issues we are facing in our local community.

   Growing Great Kids Prenatal to Age 3 Curriculum:

   The Growing Great Kids (GGK) Prenatal to Age 3 Parenting Curriculum was developed to address the unique needs of home visitors, parenting group facilitators and their supervisors throughout their work with families and children. GGK reaches across all cultures and is the only curriculum available that was designed to reinforce the skills and techniques that our staff and supervisors learned during their core training.

   In the words of Jeree Pawl, nationally recognized pioneer and expert in the field of infant mental health and parenting:

   "Most often, the knowledge so carefully presented here in Growing Great Kids, has been largely lacking in the preparation of practitioners, leaving the practitioner untethered, uncomfortable and often unsure even of their role. For the practitioner, Growing Great Kids replaces what is very often a vague space, with solid ground on which to stand."

   We believe that utilizing GGK with our participating families will support our efforts to build strong and healthy parent child relationships. In addition, our staff and supervisors will finally have a tool that can support them as they work to support families.

   GGK Structure:

   GGK reinforces staff skills by using a strength based approach to introduce topics with parents in 6 major areas intended to support parent-child relationships. Those areas include basic care, cues and communication, play and stimulation, social and emotional development, brain development and the parents’ corner. All six areas are covered for every 3 months of the prenatal period and the child’s first three years. The activities are easy and affordable for our families because they use materials that can be found within the home to build child development and parent-child relationships.

   One of the aspects of the GGK curriculum that is particularly appealing to our program is that it begins by developing the program’s supervisory skills in order to enhance our services. Our supervisor(s) will participate in a week long GGK training where they will learn how to use the curriculum by hands on practice with parents and their young children. They will also learn how to train our staff in how to integrate the curriculum into their daily work.

   This approach builds the long term capacity of the program to use the curriculum effectively. It allows supervisors to continue to train additional or replacement home visitors. In addition, this approach fosters stronger relationships between FSW and their supervisors and helps teams to develop a more efficient approach to supporting families.

   Following the training, supervisors will use the GGK Implementation Manual to begin integrating the curriculum into weekly work plans. The Implementation Manual provides comprehensive support to staff and supervisors including:

   • A detailed recommended plan for preparing staff in how to use GGK for the first year. It includes specific tasks for each month of implementation to assist staff and supervisors in integrating GGK into existing services.
     
     
   • Assignments that serve as ongoing training and assist in developing staff skills in six basic competencies. The self-assessments serve as the basis for enhancing these core competencies:
     
     • cultivating nurturing parent-child relationships and empathetic child guidance
     • being strength-based and solution-focused
     • understanding infant and child care
     • understanding healthy childhood growth and development
     • using activities and seizing teachable moments to anchor learning,
     • weaving family enhancement modules into the fabric of home visits
     
     
   • Home Visit/Module Documentation Records. These records track the completion of module components, help staff articulate what they did to support parental and child growth, and track parent-infant relationship observations. This aspect supports staff in maintaining fidelity to the curriculum and providing consistent services to families across workers. Further, these convenient records document the content of each home visit, which can strengthen program evaluation and quality management.

   GGK also includes the Growing Great Families manual that supports staff in learning about what families value and the strengths and skills they possess. This will help our staff know how to address concerns or issues with parents from a strength-based perspective, and how to support parents in accomplishing their goals.

   Growing Great Families contains the following modules:

   • Learning About Family Values: The Foundation For Supporting Growth
   • Cultural Values And Family Practices
   • Planning A Family
   • Parental Expectations: Who The Child Becomes
   • Growing Goals
   • Supporting Parents Working Towards Goals
   • Using Disagreements As Opportunities For Building Stronger Families

   Summary:

   [Program] believes that by using GGK, we will help our parents:

   • Understand the need for and the "how to" build their child’s self esteem (make their child feel valued, safe, loved, etc.)
   • Understand the relationship between what they are doing as parents and their child’s development
   • Feel success, confidence and competence as a parent
   • Develop stress management and problem solving skills
   • Understand and feeling capable of managing child’s difficult behaviors
   • View child’s behavior as appropriate based on developmental stage
   • Enjoy their child
   • Feel strong, positive attachment to the child
   • Understand and validate their child’s feelings
   • Spend more time teaching, talking and reading to their child
   • Respond quickly to medical/health needs/concerns of the child

   We also expect that our staff and supervisors will be supported in:

   • Knowing what to do and how to do it
   • Knowing how to focus on parenting and child development during home visits
   • Having clearer boundaries about role and scope of work
   • Knowing how to prepare, guide and support staff in meeting program goals
   • Feeling greater satisfaction (more confident and competent in work)
   • Staying longer in job
   • Having enhanced working relationships
   
   
3. Partnering Organization - Great Kids, Inc.

   Great Kids, Inc. (GKI - formerly The Family Institute) is an international training and consulting firm with a focus on improving outcomes for children by educating and supporting their parents, prenatally and during the first five years of life. The emphasis of GKI is on preparing children to meet the challenges in their communities when they become adults.

   GKI has provided training and technical assistance to Healthy Families, Early Head Start and other home visiting and family support programs in hundreds of communities across the U.S., Canada and the Philippines. All GKI trainers/consultants have extensive experience working in home visiting programs for parents of young children. GKI prides itself on conducting interactive, strength based seminars focused on building staff competencies which transfer to on-the-job skills.

   GKI President and Executive Director, Betsy Dew, was one of the co-founders of Hawaii’s Healthy Start program, the basis for the design of the Healthy Families America approach to home visiting. Ms. Dew and GGK co-author Linda Elliot, ACSW, worked with Prevent Child Abuse America (formerly NCPCA) to develop and launch the Healthy Families America initiative in 1992. They were also on the team to design and develop the HFA national training curriculum, the HFA trainer training curriculum, and the HFA Credentialing process. GGK co-author Kathryn Flanagan, MSW, joined the organization in 1995 as a trainer and consultant after launching one of the first HFA programs in the country in 1992.

   GGK authors Linda Elliot and Kathryn Flanagan bring decades of experience in clinical social work and professional practice in the field of early childhood development and parenting to the development of this comprehensive Growing Great Kids Curriculum.

ADDENDUM

Quotes from "Ghosts from the Nursery"

“Infancy, a time to which our nation is blindsided, is a crucial developmental stage when an individual forms the core of conscience, develops the ability to trust and relate to others and lays down the foundation for lifelong learning and thinking. The quality of the human environment is directly tied to each individual’s ability to love, to empathize with others, and to engage in complex thinking.” (p. 12)

“Infant and toddlerhood are times of enormous complexity when potentials for favorable adult outcomes can be maximized, diminished or lost.” (p. 15)

“The interactive process most protective against later violent behavior begins in the first year after birth: the formation of a secure attachment relationship with a primary caregiver. Here in one relationship lies the foundation of three key protective factors that mitigate against later aggression: the learning of empathy or emotional attachment to others; the opportunity to learn to control and balance feeling...; and the opportunity to develop capacities for higher levels of cognitive processing.” (p. 184)

“One study found that maternal attentiveness and mood during feeding when infants were four months and twelve months of age significantly predicted children’s three year old language performance and four year old IQ. The research indicates that this interactive teaching is particularly effective when begun during early infancy (italics added). Babies whose mothers engaged them in a teaching process at four months, providing them with opportunities to observe, imitate and learn, performed higher on IQ tests at age four than children who were exposed to the same teaching beginning at age one.” (p. 205)

Implications of the Packard Report

Last year, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation released "The Future of Children Spring/Summer 1999, Home Visiting: Recent Program Evaluations." This publication examined the outcomes from randomized trials done on several different approaches to home visiting. The programs examined included the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP), Hawaii’s Healthy Start, Healthy Families America (HFA), The Home Instruction Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY), Nurse Home Visitation Program, and Parents As Teachers (PAT).

The report specifically indicated that, "the key aspects of program implementation concern family engagement, the delivery of the curriculum, and the skills and abilities of the home visitors in forging relationships with the families." "The studies in [that] journal issue and others indicate that home visiting programs struggle to attract and maintain family involvement and to ensure that their curricula are delivered with fidelity to their original models.

One of the biggest challenges among Healthy Families programs, in particular, is that there is no set curriculum for working with families. Individual programs are constantly looking for curricula, because no one curriculum has been available to meet their needs. Since the beginning of the Healthy Families initiative, each program has used different information when working with families. Therefore, not only are HF programs not delivering curricula with fidelity across sites, they are using different curricula altogether. This places a tremendous burden on FSWs and their supervisors to create individual plans for each family in their caseloads on a weekly basis.

In addition, most curricula used in the field focus primarily on sharing information about basic care and child development. In our experience, none of the available curricula focuses more broadly on sharing this information within the context of fostering positive parent-child relationships while also guiding home visitors in their efforts to provide strength-based support to families.

Two other areas that programs struggle with are family and staff retention. According to the Packard report, "Between 20% and 67% of those families enrolled in home visiting program studied in the journal left the programs before the programs were scheduled to end." "The reasons for leaving included moving out of the community and returning to work, as well as lack of interest. In addition, the report states that, "Unless parents believe that the home visiting services will help them accomplish some goals that they have set for themselves, and that their time is more valuably spent in home visiting than in some other activity, it is unclear why they should continue participation."

Staff retention is another difficult area for programs across the home visiting field. "Because the connection between home visitors and families is the route through which change is hypothesized to occur, turnover among home visitors may be a serious problem for programs. Several of the programs had significant turnover among home visitors..." "The consistency with which turnover is reported as a problem also suggests that programs should pay attention to that issue." The report indicates that the staffing issues found in the field of home visiting are similar to the child care field, and suggests that home visiting programs might increase service quality and improve outcomes by enhancing worker training. Supervision and job satisfaction are other important factors in staff retention. Job satisfaction is closely related to feelings of competence in one’s work.

Parenting & Child Development : For Child Caregivers : Research : Sample Proposal