Integrating Professional Development for Family Child Care Providers into Statewide Systems
On Demand
Duration: 60 minutes
Family child care (FCC) providers play an essential role in infant and toddler care across the country, particularly in areas that are otherwise underserved, known as “child care deserts.” Unfortunately, they also often face a deep sense of isolation, encountering logistical and cost barriers to engaging with state quality improvement systems and to becoming licensed.
Learn about how the state of Colorado is seeking to combat some of these challenges by piloting a systems-level approach to supporting FCC providers, rolling out job-embedded professional development designed to increase the quality of caregiver-child engagement county by county. During the webinar, we heard from both state and county leads on the project.
We explored:- How the initiative got funded and how it launched
- The process of expanding statewide
- Outcomes of the program so far, including valuable data insights into informal care settings
Learn more about supporting family child providers on our blog.
Presenters
About Lisa Matter
The most important educational period of life, infancy and toddlerhood, has been a central passion and theme of Lisa Matter’s career. She has become increasingly more involved with the Expanding Quality in Infant Toddler Care Initiative (EQIT) in Colorado. She began as an EQIT Instructor in 2010, the same year she became a parent. After teaching infants and toddlers for 15 years she joined the EQ statewide team as the senior infant toddler specialist at the Colorado Department of Education. Currently, she manages the EQ initiative at the Colorado Department of Human Services. In this role, Lisa teaches adults about infant and toddler development with a focus on building the reflective capacity of caregivers to ensure every child has access to the responsive adult relationships that signify quality care. She is deeply committed to improving experiences for all infants and toddlers and believes that our convictions need only be equaled by our compassion to see the changes that will ensure a meaningful life for babies and the caregivers who care for them.
About Julia Brink
Julia Brink began her career in the field of early childhood at a school-age care program, where she worked for several years. After her daughter was born, she started a family child care business out of her home in Frederick, Colorado. From 2007 to 2013, she focused on family child care, eventually becoming a mentor and quality improvement coach for family child care providers. Julia then transitioned to working at Child Care Innovations at Red Rocks Community College as an early care and education site coach. She is currently the quality improvement program coordinator for Child Care Innovations, coordinating the EQIT initiative and quality improvement work for the Triad Early Childhood Council (Triad ECC). She also coordinates training and Triad ECC's work with the only federally registered early childhood apprenticeship program. Julia loves supporting early childhood professionals in advancing their career path and improving quality measures. She currently holds an associate degree in early childhood from Red Rocks Community College and is now pursuing her bachelor's degree in sociology at the University of Northern Colorado.