COFI Parent Leaders Yolanda and Liliana spoke about their roles in creating and sustaining a statewide parent-led group informing decision-making for early childhood education and care in Illinois, plus we have a new report!
Policymakers often have good intentions when they bring community members to decision-making tables, but they don’t always know how to support them effectively. What does it take to genuinely include community members into a system and support them?
In a recent webinar, COFI Parent Leaders Yolanda and Liliana, joined with other parent leaders as well as staff members from Illinois Action for Children (IAFC), to unpack this alongside Illinois Action for Children (IAFC) and partners across Illinois. The webinar highlighted the ongoing work of COFI and IAFC to incorporate parents into a statewide early childhood decision-making table, a process that has been ongoing for nearly a decade, as well as a new joint report by COFI and IAFC: “Lessons from the Family Advisory Committee & Family Engagement Workgroup.”
“Parents led this work and have been leading this work,” said Bri Stormer, Senior Policy and Engagement Specialist at IAFC. “We want you to see how that came to be.”
“It went over my head.”
It started in 2015 when COFI parent leaders asked the State to reconsider how they engaged parents. At the time, Illinois had an Early Learning Council (ELC) made up of governor-appointed members, which included only one parent.
Yolanda said it was intimidating and challenging to follow along during meetings for several reasons. Policymakers would use jargon and acronyms that were unfamiliar to those outside of the system. Additionally, for Spanish speakers, there wasn’t an interpreter.
“It went over my head,” Yolanda said and added that meetings didn’t always cover issues that were important to parents. “We let them know that we were really interested in being a part of the Council, and we wanted to participate and shared a proposal for how we might be able to incorporate parents.”
State policymakers agreed that something needed to change, recognizing that they needed a different approach to engaging parents. “We started to dream together,” said Liliana about the planning process that included parents, partners and State officials. “We really wanted to have something that was representing all [of] the state. We researched many different models of parent advisory councils across the country like Michigan, Minneapolis, so we could think about how we would make it work and improve it for our families in Illinois.”
The process was long, and it didn’t happen overnight. However, everyone was eager to do the work to create an equitable system for genuine participation and engagement.
FAC (Family Advisory Committee) and FEW (Family Engagement Workgroup)
The webinar went on to explain the results of the work – the creation of two groups that informed COFI and IAFC’s report – the Family Advisory Committee (FAC) that advised the Early Learning Council and Family Engagement Workgroup (FEW) that advised the state on ways to incorporate family leadership into future early learning decision-making, particularly in the newly created Illinois Department of Early Childhood.
IAFC staffed and supported the groups as they developed best practices for family engagement, while COFI provided organizing and leadership training. The training helped leaders build relationships and recognize themselves as leaders in their families, communities, and the early childhood system and grew their skills as advocates.
All of this work is captured in COFI and IAFC’s joint report: “Lessons from the Family Advisory Committee & Family Engagement Workgroup.”
But the work is far from over! As Bri said during the webinar: “We want you to see the role of continuous, quality improvement in creating and refining parent engagement practices. We are never done with this work… but that doesn’t mean we don’t soldier forward.”
COFI is continuing to partner with Illinois Action for Children to support parents from across the state to inform the new Department of Early Childhood plan. Stay tuned for more information!
Drop us a line at cofi@cofionline.org, and let us know what you think of the webinar or report! Or, if you’re interested in the training that FEW and FAC received from COFI, please reach out to The COFI Center for Action and Learning at coficenter@cofionline.org.
View the June webinar: “Supporting Family Leadership in State Level Policy Making.”
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