As part of our mission to continue to keep children safe and families strong, Children’s Relief Nursery’s Board of Directors announces a potential strategic partnership and leadership change. Janice Gratton, Children’s Relief Nursery Board of Director’s Executive Committee, states, “We are in preliminary discussions with a potential services partner. We have made a few changes in staff leadership positions. The Board and executive team’s goal is to continue a strong and vibrant program for the families we serve. Joining forces with another organization can make for a more efficient and economical infra-structure, particularly in the current economic environment.” The Board has appointed Karen Ward, former Director of Finance and Administration, at Children’s Relief Nursery, to Interim Executive Director. Children’s Relief Nursery will share other changes this winter when the strategic plan is complete.
We are eagerly anticipating the upcoming holiday season and thrilled to have your support. Your enthusiasm and generosity sustains our mission.
This year, we have made a few changes. We are now offering opportunities to adopt a classroom instead of an individual family. Our teachers and social workers have identified specific items that will enhance our therapeutic classrooms and the nursery as a whole. A variety of items have been selected, from books and educational toys, to furniture and clothing.
Below you will find a list of where to purchase these specific items. Some items can be found on Amazon.com, where we have created a Wish List. Please find the directions for that option below. For those of you who enjoy the true, hands-on shopping experience, you will find a gift tree, or basket with the items requested from the area stores, also found below.
We are confident that these classroom items will be utilized for years to come, passing through countless children’s hands, and changing lots of little lives along the way. Our teachers will cherish the items, as well.
We whole-heartedly thank you for your generosity and willingness to help sustain our children, our program, and our shared community.
A special thanks to The Law Offices of George J. Wall, Biamp Systems, Farleigh Wada and Witt, Annie Blooms Books, and Avalon Spa and Hotel for their outstanding support during this holiday season.
Best of the season to you and happy giving!
To find our gift tags, please visit:
Any way you choose to support healthy families, your gift always…
• Serves over hundreds of kids and families each year, making them whole again.
• Gives young children and their parents a chance to overcome trauma.
• Teaches parents how to be healthy and positive role models for their children.
• Most importantly, your gift helps prevent child abuse and neglect in our community.
Please make your gift online today to give kids hope for a fulfilling life. Thank you.
Willamette Week Give!Guide
Children’s Relief Nursery is thrilled to be a part of Willamette Week’s Give!Guide this year! Each year, the Give!Guide selects non-profit organizations to be featured in their holiday giving publication. Donations given to Children’s Relief Nursery through the Give!Guide are fully tax-deductible and include great incentives, such as:
•If you give $10-$499 you get: A postcard loaded with coupons good for discounts and freebies all over town. There will be two levels of postcards-one for donors of between $10 and $99, another for donors of $100 to $499. Larger gifts result in better deals. The first 1,000 or so donors in the $100 to $499 category, for example, will also receive free Chinook Book apps. Check out wweek.com/giveguide for the complete list.
•If you give $500-$999 you get: Home delivery of a bottle of wine from A to Z Wineworks, a nice bag of Stumptown Coffee, a 22 oz bottle of Widmer Bros Beer, a Chinook Book app, and more.
•If you give $1,000-$2,499 you get more home delivery: A bottle of pinot noir from Rex Hill Vineyards, the Chinook Book app, a package of Bob’s Red Mill Honey Oats Granola, Stumptown Coffee, a 22 oz bottle of Widmer Bros Beer (924 series), and more.
•If you give $2,500 or more you get: Delivery from one of Willamette Week’s owners (Editor Mark Zusman or Publisher Richard Meeker) of a bottle of sparkling wine, some especially fine Rex Hill pinot, Moonstruck Chocolates, Stam dog treats, Bob’s Red Mill Steel Cut Oats, and more, including the Chinook Book app.
•Thursday, Nov. 17 is Clear Creek Distillery Day at Give!Guide. One lucky donor will receive one bottle of every eau de vie and liqueur Clear Creek produces!
Give now here. Children’s Relief Nursery is located under the Social Action section. Thank you and Happy Holidays!
Check out CRN’s video blog for the Give!Guide project:
Children’s Relief Nursery is ecstatic to announce that we have made the 2011 list of the third annual 100 Best Nonprofits to Work For in Oregon! The rankings were based on the confidential input of nearly 5,500 employees from 170 nonprofits across Oregon, who answered 35 questions about workplace satisfaction such as benefits, management, trust, work environment and career development. The survey was voluntary and free of charge, and independently calculated by research partners Davis, Hibbitts and Midghall.
Occupy Wall Street is shining a useful spotlight on one of America’s central challenges, the inequality that leaves the richest 1 percent of Americans with a greater net worth than the entire bottom 90 percent.
Most of the proposed remedies involve changes in taxes and regulations, and they would help. But the single step that would do the most to reduce inequality has nothing to do with finance at all. It’s an expansion of early childhood education.
Huh? That will seem naïve and bizarre to many who chafe at inequities and who think the first step is to throw a few bankers into prison. But although part of the problem is billionaires being taxed at lower rates than those with more modest incomes, a bigger source of structural inequity is that many young people never get the skills to compete. They’re just left behind.
“This is where inequality starts,” said Kathleen McCartney, the dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, as she showed me a chart demonstrating that even before kindergarten there are significant performance gaps between rich and poor students. Those gaps then widen further in school.
“The reason early education is important is that you build a foundation for school success,” she added. “And success breeds success.”
One common thread, whether I’m reporting on poverty in New York City or in Sierra Leone, is that a good education tends to be the most reliable escalator out of poverty. Another common thread: whether in America or Africa, disadvantaged kids often don’t get a chance to board that escalator.
Maybe it seems absurd to propose expansion of early childhood education at a time when budgets are being slashed. Yet James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, has shown that investments in early childhood education pay for themselves. Indeed, he argues that they pay a return of 7 percent or more — better than many investments on Wall Street.
“Schooling after the second grade plays only a minor role in creating or reducing gaps,” Heckman argues in an important article this year in American Educator. “It is imperative to change the way we look at education. We should invest in the foundation of school readiness from birth to age 5.”
One of the most studied initiatives in this area was the Perry Preschool program, which worked with disadvantaged black children in Michigan in the 1960s. Compared with a control group, children who went through the Perry program were 22 percent more likely to finish high school and were arrested less than half as often for felonies. They were half as likely to receive public assistance and three times as likely to own their own homes.
We don’t want to get too excited with these statistics, or those of the equally studied Abecedarian Project in North Carolina. The program was tiny, and many antipoverty initiatives work wonderfully when they’re experiments but founder when scaled up. Still, new research suggests that early childhood education can work even in the real world at scale.
Take Head Start, which serves more than 900,000 low-income children a year. There are flaws in Head Start, and researchers have found that while it improved test results, those gains were fleeting. As a result, Head Start seemed to confer no lasting benefits, and it has been widely criticized as a failure.
Not so fast.
One of the Harvard scholars I interviewed, David Deming, compared the outcomes of children who were in Head Start with their siblings who did not participate. Professor Deming found that critics were right that the Head Start advantage in test scores faded quickly. But, in other areas, perhaps more important ones, he found that Head Start had a significant long-term impact: the former Head Start participants are significantly less likely than siblings to repeat grades, to be diagnosed with a learning disability, or to suffer the kind of poor health associated with poverty. Head Start alumni were more likely than their siblings to graduate from high school and attend college.
Professor Deming found that in these life outcomes, Head Start had about 80 percent of the impact of the Perry program — a stunning achievement.
Something similar seems to be true of the large-scale prekindergarten program in Boston. Hirokazu Yoshikawa and Christina Weiland, both of Harvard, found that it erased the Latino-white testing gap in kindergarten and sharply reduced the black-white gap.
President Obama often talked in his campaign about early childhood education, and he probably agrees with everything I’ve said. But the issue has slipped away and off the agenda.
That’s sad because the question isn’t whether we can afford early childhood education, but whether we can afford not to provide it. We can pay for prisons or we can pay, less, for early childhood education to help build a fairer and more equitable nation.
One of my favorite things about being a county commissioner is getting to see, up close and personal, non-profits who are making a huge difference in the lives of vulnerable children and families in our community. This week I had the chance to tour the Children’s Relief Nursery in St. Johns. Sadly, every eight minutes a report is taken of child abuse or neglect in Oregon. And half of those children are infants or toddlers. That is heartbreaking — but with the right interventions, families can get the support they need to reduce their stress and help keep their children safe.
The Relief Nursery provides therapeutic classrooms for young children and services to families who are under significant stress. Early intervention and prevention are the keys to keeping children safe. By coupling remarkable classrooms where vulnerable children thrive with “wrap around” services so families can get the support they need, the Relief Nursery is truly making a difference in our community.
To learn more about how you can support the Children’s Relief Nursery, visit http://crn4kids.org/.
What a great night! Together, we raised over $235,000 at the annual Iron Chef event last Saturday night, thanks to our donors. A big round of applause to the entire CRN team of the board, staff, volunteers, and supporters. Thank you!
Adam Sappington won his third - yes, third - Iron Chef title! Congratulations, Adam for working magic with three secret ingredients: cherries, Guinness, and Greek yogurt!
Adam Higgs won the People’s Choice Competition with his Louisiana Cane Syrup Cured Pork Tenderloin. Yum!
#pdxironchef was Twitter’s trending topic in Portland on Saturday night
Please join this joyous momentum and get involved in Children’s Relief Nursery. There are so many ways to be involved:
RSVP for a tour of our site to see us in action with the kids (call us at 503-595-4511)
Participate in an event committee or other special initiative (call us at 503-595-4511)
Join Young Friends of CRN (call us at 503-595-4511)
We are grateful to include you in the CRN family. Thank you for joining with us in the critical mission of preventing child abuse and neglect in Portland!
The Nursery sincerely thanks these wonderful companies who are helping to prevent child abuse every day with their gifts to our Iron Chef Event. Over the course of a year, they are supporting hundreds of children and families who are at-risk.
Julia was not excited about the impending birth of her third child. She worked hard to be a good mom, but with two special needs children and a husband forced to work incredibly long hours, she was physically and emotionally exhausted. Add to those burdens the stresses of being on the wrong side of a language barrier and barely on the right side of the poverty barrier. Plus, Julia and her husband had no family that could help out with caring for a daughter with a severe speech problem and a son with Down Syndrome.
It’s a story no less poignant for its familiarity to Children’s Relief Nursery staff. Sometimes one more stress is just one stress too many.
As soon as Julia came to Children’s Relief Nursery, she met with a bilingual case manager who steered her to available community resources and who served as her guide through the maze of social service agencies. Julia enrolled in the Latino Parent Connection and learned how to raise special needs children in a loving and structured home. Perhaps most important, Julia made friends with a network of parents facing similar issues. After her third child was born, a much more confident Julia started attending weekly parent-infant classes where she worked on forming a close bond with her new baby. We were able to form a close bond with Julia through weekly home visits. Julia’s family also received food boxes, clothing, and diapers from our donors. One of our special features is the respite care program, which lets parents like Julia drop off their children when they need to go to an appointment, run errands, or just take a break.
It’s when we can connect on multiple levels, as was the case with Julia, that the stresses that interfere with a normal life can be reduced. Most important, it makes for a safer, stronger family.
*Names have been changed to protect the privacy of our clients
