Opening Doors to Parent Leadership with Abriendo Puertas
By Bianca De La Piedra, Early Head Start Family Advocate at Kidango. Published on May 10, 2019.
And it begins! We are opening doors not just for ourselves, but also for our future leaders. It’s time for learning, sharing, and embarking on this journey together to empower our families and communities to achieve their goals and obtain success. This seems like a huge task, but as a collective and in partnership with our families, nothing is impossible!
Abriendo Puertas, Opening Doors, is a research-based parenting curriculum with a focus on leadership and advocacy for families with children ages 0-5. This curriculum utilizes the popular education approach where everyone is a learner and everyone is a teacher. Sharing from our experiences is key. The following quote is the essence of the program: “Tell me and I’ll forget, show me and I’ll remember, involve me and I will make it mine”. Our goal is to have families learn from and with each other to better shape our children’s futures.
Families will have the opportunity to graduate from this program with a new-found sense of community, accomplishment, knowledge, empowerment, and skills to lay down the foundation they would like to have for their families. This not only affects one family because with this program, parents can have a profound effect on multiple families through advocacy and leadership. Social change can begin to take place. All it takes is for one person to get it started.
This program was chosen by our Early Head Start-Child Care Partnership policy council families to be implemented at our Early Head Start Centers: Hobbs, Marie Kaiser, Decoto, Castlemont, Arbuckle, Foxdale, Chynoweth, and Eden Palms. Kidango staff were trained in March 2019 to facilitate the curriculum, and are extremely excited to begin their sessions with the families. The sessions will be offered in Spanish and English to the families of our Early Head Start Centers beginning in May 2019. Stay tuned for more exciting news!
