SRQ Magazine | In Conversation with Organizations Supporting Children and Families

In Conversation

IN CONVERSATION WITH ORGANIZATIONS SUPPORTING CHILDREN AND FAMILIES.

INTERVIEW BY WES ROBERTS

EDITED BY BARBIE HEIT

LET’S START OFF WITH A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOURSELVES AND WHAT YOU DO. BRONWYN BEIGHTOL:

I’ve been with United Way for 15 years, but I’ve been working in the nonprofit sector for more than 25 years now, and I’ve had the privilege of focusing mostly on early education in that work. From the United Way Suncoast standpoint, we believe that everybody deserves equitable access to opportunities to create the lives they imagine. We act on that belief by partnering with businesses, nonprofits, media, government, and our community to focus on early education. PHILIP TAVILL: We are an early childhood comprehensive provider and family strengthening program serving Sarasota County.

BRONWYN BEIGHTOL, CHIEF IMPACT OFFICER UNITED WAY SUNCOAST

HOW DOES YOUR ORGANIZATION CONNECT WITH CHILDREN IN OUR REGION AND WHAT ARE THE SPACES OR ENVIRONMENTS IN WHICH YOUR INFLUENCE IS FOCUSED. BEIGHTOL: I’d like to think that we intersect with children and families in most of the ways that children and families live their lives. So from a partnering perspective, we’re involved with the nonprofits in our community, bringing alignment, collaboration, and strategic focus in particular areas. If we’re talking about early education, in just the past few years, we’ve started focusing on our Quality Child Care Initiative, which is making sure that there are quality childcare opportunities for families that we refer to as ALICE– Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed–basically in our community, more

ENGAGING READERS THROUGH STORYTELLING.

than half who are working hard every single day trying to make ends meet, and realizing that the cost of childcare can cost as much as a year’s worth of tuition at USF. The Quality Child Care Initiative is making sure that our childcare centers have what they need to provide services for our families. And that can be anywhere from educational materials, to professional development support, to behavioral health support, and to making sure that our centers have the materials that they need to be successful. One quick story that came to light even moreso after this latest hurricane, is that a center can’t function, can’t operate if it doesn’t have the necessary equipment or safety protocols in place. So we had a center that lost a fence and lost some of their outside toys and they couldn’t open up without having that available. You

PHILIP TAVILL, PRESIDENT AND CEO CHILDREN FIRST

would think if the inside is okay, everything’s going to be alright. It’s not. So we worked with our Early Learning Coalition, which is another wonderful partnership. This was in DeSoto County, and we made sure that they had what they needed and got that sorted out so that they could get opened up as soon as possible, and serve our communities and families. Because again, families needed to go to work. And our children still needed to be in an early educational environment, for more reasons than just families going to work. TAVILL: We have multiple sites throughout the county from North Port to Newtown. And our connection with children is really year-round. Infant and toddler care, beginning with services to pregnant moms, taking babies into our care at six weeks of age, and working

with them in our really beautiful state-of-the-art early childhood education centers until they’re four or five and they go o to kindergarten, or as they like to call it the big school. We have multiple locations because we want to make sure that barriers to service are as limited as possible. So being in neighborhoods where our families live makes it much more convenient for them to be able to have their kids come see us. And then the other thing that really helps is our family strengthening programming, which typically runs in the evenings after the school day. And when families come back, whether it’s budgeting classes, how to become a better parent, or nurturing dads, they’re really coming back to their second home. They’re coming back to where their kids spend their day. So it behooves us to be really well located based on where our families live.

AFTER HURRICANE IAN THERE WERE RIPPLE EFFECTS OF DAMAGE, INCLUDING DELAYS IN OPENING SCHOOLS. CAN YOU SPEAK TO THE EFFECTS OF THE STORM ON THE FAMILIES YOU SERVE?

BEIGHTOL: On top of several years of a pandemic, you have this hurricane that comes up, and now you’re struggling to open schools. So families needing places to be and children needing to get their education, that didn’t go on as long as we thought it was going to have to go on. Thankfully we were able to come to a solution. Superintendent Asplen, at the time, really came up with some strategies that made sure that they were able to open the schools one by one and get our children back in as soon as possible. But when children can’t go to school, families don’t have access to getting to their job, and businesses su er. So our community as a whole struggles with that, but most importantly, our children are losing valuable, necessary, critical information, at an early stage in particular, to

be able to be successful in work and life later on. And that’s important for us to note.

TAVILL The initial impact was really around the kind of damage that many of our families sustained, as well as our sta . As you can imagine with our multiple locations, we have a significant number of sta members in South County who were just dreadfully impacted by the storm. We had to assess damage to our facilities to make sure that there weren’t structural issues and we were able to do that pretty quickly. And then we came back into service really very promptly. Our challenge really was around the sta that was so severely impacted. And one of the ways that we really kicked into gear, was we had donors who provided us with funding for gas gift cards, for grocery cards so that people could just have the essentials. The other way, which isn’t so tangible, and this was critical, is we deployed our early childhood mental health sta members who are available not just to children and families, but also to our sta , and really tried to, in a sense, triage what are the needs based on the trauma that we’re seeing, and how do we address that both internally with our resources, as well as through referral. As an adult in the storm, it sounds like there’s a freight train barreling through for 10 hours. That’s how one of my sta members put it in North Port. But imagine you’re three and you experienced that, and you can’t really articulate the stress that causes you. So we’ve had what I’ll call the lingering e ects from that hurricane, just tremendous impact.

CAN YOU SPEAK TO THE FINANCIAL IMPACT?

TAVILL: We had a sta member who came out in the morning and her car had floated away. It was that much water and her house was basically surrounded by water. There was another sta member, a woman who’s

been with us for many years. Her husband, an electrician, was not going to leave her and their children home alone. And his employer said, “You don’t show up to work, you’re out of a job.” So he lost his job, in essence, because of his commitment to protecting his family. Now he’s subsequently, thankfully found better work. In addition, their generator died. And when you have medication in the fridge that has to be kept cold, it becomes life-threatening. And we were very fortunate we were able to get them a generator, somebody who had a generator donated it to them because their power was back on. We had a family of five who had been displaced because of flooding and terrible water damage, and they lived in a sta member’s home for two months.

HAVING DEALT WITH THE PANDEMIC FOR SO LONG, DO YOU THINK THERE WAS SOME MEASURE OF EMPATHY EXHAUSTION BY THE TIME THE HURRICANE HAPPENED?

BEIGHTOL: The volunteers were in the same boat as the folks they were trying to help. That was some of it. During the pandemic, Sarasota’s average rent for a two bedroom apartment increased by $500 a month. So you have folks who are losing their homes during this tragedy and struggling to even fi nd another place to live. You had rents that were going up and evictions that were happening, all of that at the same time as this hurricane came to be. So families were just struggling all the way around. So, this is my surmise, I think you had fewer helpers because the helpers were trying to fi gure themselves out as well. TAVILL: I would agree. Bronwyn, what you described about maybe fatigue from the pandemic, the storm coming, and rents going up, we have described this confluence of factors as the imperfect storm. And it is really that description that we use in terms of addressing the fact that we are

having such a hard time finding people for open positions. It’s really tough. I drove down to South County the day after the storm because there was sta we couldn’t reach. There was no cell service. And so I drove to their homes because we needed to make sure that they were at least physically sound. And it was scary to drive, I had to take a lot of alternate routes. BEIGHTOL: Something we thought we’d never have to say is we were researching and looking for donations of fungicide for people’s homes because of the mold from the flooding. There were just so many things that kept coming up that weren’t the norm, but to get people back to work, to get people to where they had that sense of self and safety, to make sure that food was available. And then we had, thanks to the Patterson Foundation, gift cards, and things like that available, and food available. And you just don’t think about what that means, and what that takes out of a household budget when all of your linens, everything in your home has been impacted by water and flooding coming into your home, and you have no real way, or the money in your budget to be able to take care of that. So that alone impacts everything in your life. That impacts whether you’re going to work, whether you can feed your children in the morning, whether your children are in school, and your mental health and wellbeing.

EMERGING FROM THIS DIFFICULT TIME, WHAT ARE YOUR OBSERVATIONS ABOUT HELPING KIDS ACHIEVE THEIR BEST?

TAVILL: I think of a number of things. One is that, and this is my gift of stating the obvious, is the use of virtual platforms. Our family strengthening programs that we call the Families First Institute, that all pivoted to virtual very quickly. So how do we take what have been in-person courses, nurturing dads, class, budgeting, all those courses that we o er, and how do we pivot to virtual, and try to lose as little as possible to the 2D e ect? And

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Bronwyn Beightol, Chief Impact Officer, United Way

Suncoast As Chief Impact

Officer for United Way Suncoast, serving Manatee, Sarasota, DeSoto, Hillsborough and Pinellas, Bronwyn Beightol provides vision, thought leadership, direction and oversight for United Way Suncoast. In September 2022, Beightol’s Chief Impact Officer duties expanded to include oversight of United Way Suncoast’s community impact work throughout its five-county footprint, including education, financial stability and support services. Now in her 16th year with United Way, Beightol took over the organization’s regional efforts in early learning and youth success in early 2022. Under her leadership, United Way Suncoast rebranded its regional early learning approach as United We Learn and amplified its commitment to quality childcare and literacy. Beightol’s work has enhanced the organization, placing 22 funded paraprofessionals in classrooms across the region. She and her team have strengthened United Way Suncoast’s Quality Childcare Initiative to include 45 schools in Hillsborough, Pinellas, Sarasota, Manatee and DeSoto counties. Many of the new advances involve replicating the initiatives Beightol helped cra in Manatee County, including the award-winning Big Plan and Campaign for Grade-Level Reading efforts. A resident of Manatee County for more than 15 years, Bronwyn has spent more than two decades in the social-impact sector leading innovative, community-level change initiatives to advance the common good. In the public sector, Bronwyn had a more than 10-year career working in publishing with Sterling Southeast, the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau and the New York Times locally at the Herald-Tribune

is what’s come out of it really positive. While we have some in-person courses going, we’re continuing with that virtual platform. And people have become so accustomed to it, and we’ve become increasingly better at the delivery of the services to make sure that what we want to convey gets conveyed. It’s really an e ective tool that allows us to reach people who otherwise might have scheduling or transportation issues. I think one of the other things, and this is really major for us, is that we’ve been in an environment where the general public, so to speak, has increasing awareness of mental health issues with very young children. So when I started this work 27 years ago, if you’d talk about a three-year-old with depression, somebody would say, “What are you talking about? Three-year-olds run around, they’re happy. They’re this, that, and the other.” I believe that the exacerbation from isolation during Covid, the resulting behaviors from that isolation, the resulting behaviors from the toxic stressors that families underwent, and how that spills over from the parent to the child, have really elevated in our community the importance of very early intervention. And it’s always been in our books, but people knowing about it and saying this is important and a hugely positive outcome from what has been a tragedy.

BEIGHTOL: It’s just building upon the idea of the knowledge that we have, and more people have this knowledge now, that 80% of a child’s brain is developed before they’re four years old, 90% by the time they’re five. That’s huge. And if our children are struggling with access to early education, and early learning, we all know that now, and we know that we need to come together around solutions for that. So for one, with United Way Suncoast, we have always been a convenor and a collaborator. So during the pandemic, and after this particular

disaster, we gathered the community together just like we always do. This time we had two important tools in our toolkit. One is we created the State of the Housing Crisis Dashboard, which has really all the information you will need right now to be able to understand the crisis that we’re in as a community, with fi nding houses for people to live, rent a ordable, and how that impacts all of our community members in so many di erent ways. You can combine that with the Tampa Bay Regional Competitiveness Report. And the second part of that is we also did a State of Early Learning Dashboard, which helps our community members understand where we are in this community, in this early learning crisis. When there are only six locations for early learning for every thousand families in our community, that’s a crisis. When early learning costs as much as college tuition in a year, that’s a crisis. When you can’t fi nd quality childcare and educators who will come in and are able to stay and we’re not paying them enough to keep them in that role and now we’re struggling to find new leaders–that’s a crisis. So in terms of how United Way addresses those, we like to educate the community, and we like to learn together with the community on best next steps. We’ve watched the trends, we’ve paid attention to the data, and we know, so we started our Quality Child Care Initiative about three years ago, focused on that early learning and investing there. We also worked to get paraprofessionals, bilingual and bi-literate, in the classrooms. Pacing and making sure that there are professional development opportunities for our early learning professionals is something that we started as well just a few years ago. So lots of ways, and of course, what we call our ALICE work, working with families in particular zip codes to make sure that chronically under-resourced and underserved communities have equitable access to the things that we need. And that involves, again, early childhood.

WHAT DOES A TRULY SUCCESSFUL EARLY CHILDHOOD ENGAGEMENT EXPERIENCE LOOK LIKE AND HOW IS IT DIFFERENT FROM THE PAST?

TAVILL: Let’s say Grandma or Grandpa from 60 years ago when they had their little 2, 3, 4 year old, were put into a Children First classroom today, and we showed them a chart called the HighScope Curriculum, a nationally utilized, well-researched, valid and reliable curriculum tool, and they saw for infants and toddlers, 43 key developmental indicators, and for preschoolers, I think it’s 56 or 57 within domains. The simplest ones to understand are things like gross motor skills, and fi ne motor skills because those are very good ways of determining a child’s development and determining whether you have to have an intervention. But then you get into things like reasoning. How does a two-year-old reason? Well actually very e ectively, and it can be deduced in a way that is measurable and teachable. So I think that grandparents landing and looking at these HighScope key developmental indicators might have their minds blown a little bit to say, wow, this is a very precise, very measurable activity that determines really e ectively how a child’s developing. And the other piece that I think that I would just layer on is that in our work, we use that to create highly individualized to the child approaches. So it’s much less of a “All 18 of you will be doing this now.” And it’s, “Five of you are in small group instruction, and some of you were in a large group,” and then there’s somebody that you’re working with one-on-one.

BEIGHTOL: It used to be the idea that we just make sure that our children are safe so that we can go to work, or so that we can do this or that. Or maybe we didn’t know that it was so important to develop a child’s brain with intention from the time they were young. I think they’d be shocked to learn that a child needs to know so

ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Philip Tavill, President and CEO, Children First

Philip Tavill has been President & CEO of Children First, Sarasota County’s exclusive Head Start provider, since 1996. Since obtaining a baccalaureate degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee in 1989, Mr. Tavill has worked in the human services field both in direct service and management capacities. He returned to Sarasota in 1990 and was appointed Executive Director of the Loveland Center in 1991. At Case Western Reserve University, he earned a Master of Nonprofit Organizations from the Weatherhead School of Management and Master of Science in Social Administration from the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. In 2022, Mr. Tavill received the Mandel School Alumni Association Nonprofit Leadership Award. Most recently, he was recognized with the Billy J. McCain, Sr. Excellence in Community Service Award from the National Head Start Association Region IV District and the Sargent Shriver Community Service Award from the Florida Head Start Association for his impact in elevating excellence across the Head Start community.

much more now just to be ready for school. It might even be shocking to understand that if a child doesn’t know how to tie their shoes, the kindergarten teacher has to spend a lot of time making sure that children can tie their shoes rather than focusing on their academic success. So things like that that we wouldn’t maybe have had on our radar. I think it also means that as a society, we’ve started to understand that right now we’re not really raising children, we’re raising adults. We’re raising adults for the next generation, the next workforce. And you’ve got to start early, and you’ve got to be consistent, and it has to be high quality. TAVILL: I do want to tag on that we really value the importance of play. Play is learning, it’s sharing with others. It’s checking impulse control. But it’s play, it’s fantastic. My o ce opens onto the playground, and I love the shrieks, and they’re running full speed, and they’re throwing the ball because it is rigorous. But we recognize very clearly the importance of that unstructured playtime.

PLEASE TELL ME ABOUT THE FUNDING FOR BOTH OF YOUR ORGANIZATIONS. WHERE DOES THE MONEY COME FROM? AND WHEN PEOPLE GIVE AND DONATE, WHAT ARE THEY GETTING IN RETURN? BEIGHTOL: With the United Way Suncoast, our funding comes from a number of places, and a number of sources. We do workforce campaigns, so a lot of the companies in the area provide that philanthropic opportunity for their team members.

It’s a wonderful thing to see because I like to call it an everyday philanthropist. So you can be a large-scale change-maker in the community with whatever you’re able to a ord in terms of giving. We also have private, what we call the Tocqueville donors, that are highlevel donors in the community.

We get some grants as well from a number of di erent places. So we have a number of funding sources. And what that funding source really gets you is, I refer to it a little bit in the idea of the everyday philanthropist, you get a force multiplier with what United Way Suncoast does. So we bring partners together with intention around specific community challenges and aspirations, and we provide solutions together. Solutions that for us are focused on both systemic change and lasting impact. So that’s a high-level view of United Way Suncoast. TAVILL: For us, funding is a little bit unique. As a head start, early head start grantee, many of those programs, it’s 99% of their funding. For us, it’s about 60% of our funding. So it’s a really good solid base. Something important to know is that for every local dollar, including United Way, including Sarasota County, and most importantly philanthropists, every dollar is securing four federal dollars. It’s an unbelievable match. It’s hard to fi nd that. And when you ask what folks are getting, I’ll give you the broad answer. They’re getting an extraordinarily high-quality, early childhood, early care in early childhood experience for those children who are most vulnerable in our community. It in a sense is allowing those kids to come into kindergarten and be on par with their peers, where otherwise they wouldn’t. It’s also, and this is a less visible aspect of what we do, is providing tremendous support to families with the goal of those families becoming increasingly self-su cient and independent. And we measure that. So when we take a parent into our parent training program, something we’ve formalized over the last few years, and they’re not making a lot of money, and clearly, there’s been an increase in wages, but they suddenly get a job where they’re making $22 an hour because of the work that we’ve put in with them, their entire world changes. I mean, it’s a remarkable shift. And that, to a great extent, is because of our investment in

helping one, our parents be their children’s first teachers, and two, helping them recognize that they can dream and we can help them realize those dreams. BEIGHTOL: I want to add, too, the human capital. People invest their money, but they also invest their time and their energy.

TAVILL: One more thing that I feel is so important to become more aware of is that when we look at a kindergarten teacher in our public schools, or private schools, we have an expectation that they’re going to do really good work with those brandnew kindergartners. And that from the beginning of the year to the end of the year, there’ll be very significant development of those kids. In Sarasota County schools, I think that the beginning salary for kindergarten teachers is about $55,000 a year. My question is that when you have a bachelor’s degree as an early childhood educator, why is it that our community is not bringing forth the resources to pay that individual $55,000 a year when 90% of brain development is occurring? There’s no do-over. It’s a one-shot deal. And one answer that I get is, well, it’s so expensive because the ratios are so much lower. So there might be 18 or 20 kindergarten kids. Well, there’s going to be 18 preschoolers, and we’re going to have three sta members, a lead teacher with a bachelor’s, an assistant teacher, and a classroom aid. And what I would propose is that the three of them and the work that they are doing allow for the kindergarten teacher’s success allowing for them to be reading on grade level at third grade, which is an excellent predictor of high school graduation. And so one of the messages we have a constant drumbeat is we need support for these folks who say, “I am committed to early childhood education, and I need to be able to make a living at it.” When rents have gone up so much, when there’s inflationary pressure, I think it’s an obligation to our children via the vehicle of our deeply committed teachers. SRQ