Getting to Know Your International Contacts-Part 2

I subscribed to World Forum radio weeks ago and I recently listened to a podcast featuring Barbara Jones. Barbara Jones, better known as "BJ", successfully launched and operated Pine Grove Montessori School 20 years ago. She recalls heading out to Southern California to find an ideal early childhood experience she had read in books all the while, looking for a job. She found a job opening for a Montessori school teacher. She received a surreal response and by the Montessori director who stated that she had a' psychic feeling' that Barbara would apply for the job. She found this intriguing and worked in the program for years and decided Montessori was the way to go. She continued to study the Montessori philosophy and later in life found a vacant school house where she could make her dream of opening a Montessori school come true. When the property for her school came available she made arrangements to open a private Montessori, historical school house. She speaks in awe of the property and the place in which the school is still located and shares her excitement about her continuing experience in working with children in the early childhood field.




Global Children’s Initiative” website (http://developingchild.harvard.edu/initiatives/global_initiative/)

3 insights:

The Center's Global Children's Initiative has started a portfolio containing activities in the following areas: Early Childhood Development, mental health and children in crisis and conflict situations.

Information on each domain is as follows:

Early Childhood Development
 

Child Mental Health

Mental health concerns constitute a massively under-addressed issue that has significant implications for the broader health and development of children and societies. There is an urgent need to identify the scope of the problem within and across countries and to develop evidence-based approaches in policy and service delivery that are responsive to diverse cultural contexts. To respond to this challenge, a working group of Harvard faculty is developing a focused agenda in research, education, and public engagement to address significant gaps in knowledge and service delivery. The following three initial projects have been selected to launch this effort, subject to sufficient funding:

• Assessing the state of child mental health services in Shanghai, China;
• Developing and evaluating family-based strategies to prevent mental health problems in children affected by HIV/AIDS in Rwanda; and
• Addressing child maltreatment and mental health outcomes in three Caribbean nations (Barbados, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, and Suriname). 

To strengthen their policy relevance, each of these projects is being designed to include an economic component to analyze allocation effects in the supply and demand for services.

Children and Crisis 

The Global Children’s Initiative is currently exploring potential synergies with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health, both of which have extensive experience working in emergency situations across the world. The goal of this effort is to foster interdisciplinary collaboration that incorporates a science-based, developmental perspective into the assessment and management of child well-being in a range of natural and man-made crises, focusing on both immediate circumstances and long-term adaptation. Two issues are the initial focus of activity in this domain:

• Exploring comparable approaches to surveying child status in post-earthquake Haiti and Chile.
• Bringing the science of child development into strategies for addressing acute malnutrition.

Global Children's Initiative. (3, February, 2012). Global Children's Initiative-Activities, Frontiers of Innovation, Knowledge generation. Retrieved from
http://developingchild.harvard.edu/initiatives/global_initiative/




The first priority in this area is to adapt the successful work the Center has conducted in the United States for a broader range of strategically selected audiences, in an effort to energize and reframe the global dialogue around investments in the earliest years of life. To this end, we plan to educate the leadership of key international agencies, publish and disseminate papers to establish a strong scientific framework for global work, and conduct systematic communications research to identify the most effective ways to translate the science of child development for global policymakers.
The second priority is to generate and apply new knowledge that addresses the health and developmental needs of young children in a variety of settings. Initial projects that are in various stages of planning, fundraising, and implementation include the following:

• Assessing quality in early childhood environments and programs in diverse global contexts;
• Piloting assessments to measure child development outcomes linked to malaria control strategies in Zambia; and
• Expanding effective interventions to improve preschool quality in Chile.

The Center also plans to convene research forums to facilitate collaboration among a wide network of scholars globally to share findings and co-develop publications.