Sample Grant 1

National Center for the Parent-Child Home Program 

Implementation of Strategic Business Plan - $75,000 for one year

The Parent-Child Home Program is a research-based and research-validated early childhood literacy and school readiness program. The Program successfully strengthens families and prepares children for academic success through intensive home visiting. Since 1965, this innovative program has emphasized the importance of quality parent-child verbal interaction to promote the cognitive and social-emotional development that children need in order to enter school with the tools they need to become successful students.

The Parent-Child Home Program's National Center was incorporated in 1979 and is headquartered on Long Island with the mission to ensure that families in communities across the country have access to The Parent-Child Home Program. The National Center assists communities in developing Parent-Child Home Program replications and expanding existing sites. The center works to increase public awareness about the importance of early parent-child verbal interaction and works with public officials to increase the availability of public funds that can be utilized to support Parent-Child Home Program replications around the country.  Through the work of the National Center the program has expanded from a small, well-researched model with a handful of sites to serving more than 6,000 families in 155 replications in 12 states.  Sixteen sites are located on Long Island serving 500 families.

The Rauch Foundation grant will support the implementation of their recently completed strategic business plan to accelerate the rate of growth for the program over the next five years.  By increasing and reorganizing staff positions, setting targeted geographic goals and upgrading data collection and information systems to assist in quality monitoring they expect to more than double the number of families served by 2011.

Replicate Parent-Child Home Program for Family Child Care Providers on Long Island - $40,000 for one year

Another goal of the strategic business plan is to continue to add services provided to families within the program’s area of expertise.  This grant will initiate a program to train family child care providers on Long Island in creating a language rich, verbal interactive environment.  Working with local child care resource and referral agencies, this program will adapt a model that has been piloted and evaluated as successful at several Massachusetts sites.   

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Sample Grant 2

New York State Child Care Coordinating Council  

An Early Childhood Quality Rating System for New York State - $25,000 for one year

The New York State Child Care Coordinating Council (NYSCCCC) has been working to make quality, affordable child care available to New York’s families since 1975. Rooted in a statewide network of child care resource and referral agencies, the membership of NYSCCCC includes wide representation from child care providers, parents, businesses, community organizations, and other individuals.  To address issues of quality of care within the regulated child care market, more than 2/3 of the states have introduced some type of tiered quality rating system (QRS) where programs are differentiated and/or funded by levels of quality.  QRS programs are one of the key strategies being used for improving the quality of early care and education nationally.

Two years ago the Rauch Foundation helped to fund the initial development phase for such a system, a collaborative effort led by NYSCCCC.  During that initial phase the Council engaged more than 50 stakeholders representing every type of regulated care, as well as the organizations and regulatory agencies that credential and oversee them.  They brought in national experts, examined other state systems, measured New York’s regulations against other states and drafted an initial design for a NYS program.

This grant for the second phase of this project which will include the development of a white paper to give background on the purpose and benefits of QRS programs, how they are utilized in other states, what a NYS system would look like, and how funding will be affected by the different levels in the program.  The paper will be used to educate public agencies, the new governor and legislators and as background material for a series of focus groups organized around the state to gauge the response of providers and parents to a new system.  Based on feedback from these meetings, the QRS will be fine-tuned and adapted accordingly.  The final step in this phase will be to obtain a commitment from the new governor to move ahead with such a system. 

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Sample Grant  3

Federation of Organizations  

Foster Grandparents Program (Suffolk County) - $70,000 over two years

Nassau County Department of Senior Citizen Affairs   

Foster Grandparent Program (Nassau County) - $49,000 for one year

Incorporated in 1972, FEDERATION OF ORGANIZATIONS is a multi-service, community-based social welfare agency that develops programs to meet the needs of special populations such as: children at risk, low-income seniors, people recovering from mental illness, and the homeless.  They administer the federally funded Foster Grandparent Program in Suffolk County.

The NASSAU COUNTY DEPARTMENT OF SENIOR CITIZEN AFFAIRS is the official Area Agency on Aging for Nassau County. The Department serves as a funding agency for programs offered by other voluntary and government agencies. It provides more than 90 programs in the areas of health, housing, employment, legal services, volunteerism, home care, transportation, nutrition, etc., to improve the quality of life for older persons, among which is the Foster Grandparent Program for Nassau County.

The Foster Grandparent Program gives older, income-eligible adults the opportunity to earn extra income by working one-on-one with children who need special attention in schools, day care centers, and other educational and rehabilitative settings. They provide the individualized attention and encouragement needed to assist a child in maximizing his or her potential for academic success.

Rauch Foundation grants to these programs provide the capacity to place additional Foster Grandparents in Head Start settings in Nassau and Suffolk Counties where they can help to significantly improve the learning environment by providing one-on-one attention to those children who need it and may otherwise disrupt the classroom.  In addition, the Federation’s grant will allow them to update the content of their training specifically focused on Foster Grandparents in Head Start settings.  The Department of Senior Citizens Affairs grant will also encourage greater collaboration between the two programs and seek to initiate joint training opportunities.

www.fedoforg.org

www.nassaucountyny.gov 

Sample Grant 4

Barry and Florence Friedberg JCC 

South Shore Parenting Resource Network - $65,000 for one year

The Friedberg JCC has been serving Nassau County’s south shore for 43 years.  Its mission is to create a dynamic, caring community that helps families and youth, the elderly, the disabled and individuals at all economic levels. They provide child care services and pre-school programs for almost 500 children, along with after school and summer camp activities.  In addition, they offer support groups for parents on general parenting issues and special needs topics and provide early intervention services for young children.

This Rauch Foundation grant, made in partnership with the Horace Hagedorn Foundation, is for initial implementation of a “one call for parents of children 0-5” resource network on the south shore of Nassau County.  This project resulted from research that identified a hundreds of programs in the JCC’s 14 community catchment-area that were addressing similar populations and issues related to young children and parenting, many overlapping, many small and not well-known – yet gaps existed.  The plan for creating the South Shore Parent Resource Network contains an extensive public relations component, accessible website that links to island-wide resource and referral programs, regularly updates local programs and services, and creates ongoing dialogue among local organizations and agencies currently providing programs for parents of young children in order to minimize duplication of services and maximize future collaboration.

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