The Early Childhood Coalition
Our Coalition Goal:
To engage community organizing groups & to bring awareness to early childhood services.
The Early Childhood Coalition is a group of seven organizations and 15 individuals who are dedicated to ending early childhood homelessness and addressing the inequities that these children face in their day-to-day lives and generate reciprocity within the structures they interact with.
The ECC believes that the key to creating reciprocal relationships is to build mutual respect and appreciation for the common goal of providing the best experiences and resources for children.
Early childhood organizations need meaningful contributions from parents and families to support the planning and implementation of programs and events. Family members provide insight into the communities’ diverse backgrounds—cultural, linguistic, structural, and economic.
Families need the early learning organization to provide nurturing, developmentally appropriate experiences for their children, and to support the family’s challenges and goals. The relationship is interdependent: each should enrich the other.
Mission
Every New Mexican family with children under the age of five is safe, secure, engaged in reciprocal community relationships, and is able to make time for joy, play and self-care.
Vision
Partnering with our community to elevate families’ lived experiences, inspire empathy, and nurture early childhood stability that supports family prosperity.
History
The Early Childhood Coalition (ECC) began by bringing together leaders and organizations to coordinate a continuum of exceptional, family-driven, community-based programs and services accessible to families with children under the age of five across the state of New Mexico.
Initiated and facilitated by Cuidando Los Niños, multiple organizations across Albuquerque convened throughout 2022 to identify, address, and combat systemic barriers and obstacles faced by families with young children experiencing homelessness as well as by community organizations serving those families.
To inform its strategy, the ECC conducted a community needs assessment (CNA). Using the results of the CNA, the ECC began its strategic planning process in early 2023 to address, the ECC set the goal to have a strategic plan early 2023 to address the key challenges New Mexico families experiencing poverty and/or homelessness and with children under the age of five are facing.
Based on the findings from the CNA, it was clear to the ECC that meeting the basic needs of families with children under the age of five in New Mexico requires both short- and long-term strategic interventions; as such, the ECC created a strategic plan that begins in detail as a one year plan with the intent to leverage all learnings/findings from year 1 to inform the subsequent 4 years of strategy.
