Hand in Hand Parenting

I’m Patty Wipfler, and in 1989, I founded the nonprofit Hand in Hand Parenting. My parents were buffeted by a cascade of crises that devastated two of my five siblings’ lives. I witnessed the damage parental stress can do. I grew up determined to change the world. I spent four years teaching, then organizing with United Farmworkers. 

After my sons were born, stress mounted. I learned to listen and use a listener to escape the impulse to mistreat my children. I saw that parents doing listening exchanges became less reactive. I dove in to try to figure out how parents could listen to children, so they too could recover from hurt and harm. I have since spent tens of thousands of hours developing our approach and learning to articulate it while working with parents and children around the world. It has been hard work and the delight of my life.

The global problems of violence and racial and social injustice are rooted in disconnection. Our project aims to heal big ruptures manifested in the world by helping children and parents recover from personal disconnection through a set of trauma-informed, attachment-based parenting tools that have decades of practice-based evidence behind them.  

The organization I founded is called Hand in Hand Parenting. Through our world-wide project, we’ve reached more than 3 million people, giving them concrete tools and caring support to meet their children's core needs for connection, guidance, and recovery from hard times.

Expanding our services and research program will transform the lives of parents and those in underserved communities to lead their families well and promote the common good. 

Humanity is elevated when both parents and children grow naturally into leaders who are inspired to solve problems creatively, nurture cooperation, show others compassion and build thriving communities.

Every parent delivers love and guidance to their child when they are supported well. But the lack of emotional support for the highly emotional work of parenting is a universal problem. We improve parents’ ability to nurture their children by helping parents build peer listening support to recover from the isolation, guilt, confusion, and exhaustion endemic to parenting, and for the additional challenges of caregiving in the context of the world-wide pandemics of poverty, racism and COVID-19. 

The level of suffering for families across the world right now is profound. Over 1 billion children were victims of violence in the past year, one in four parents will be labeled with a psychiatric diagnosis in their lifetime, and one in three mothers have been subjected to intimate partner violence, says the World Health Organization. If we are to transform society into a just and cooperative one, there is no avenue more effective than empowering parents to heal from hurt, connect deeply with their children, and lead their families and communities.

Hand in Hand has the structure, leadership, and training to bring simple healing tools to families through a global network of certified instructors and through organizational partnerships serving vulnerable communities.

Three decades ago, I founded a non-profit parent support organization, Hand in Hand Parenting (HiH), to provide parents with skills in relationship-based caregiving practices. 

My childhood and adult life led me to realize the enormity and the significance of the role of parents. It is fundamental to a healthy, vibrant society that parents nurture their children well, yet parents have little to no preparation or economic base to support their work as parents. Societal protection from overwhelming parenting circumstances is rare.  

Over time, I developed five “Listening Tools” for parents, which are anchored in my experience and are in alignment with emerging research from many disciplines. The parent-child connection is the focus, as human connection is the foundation for emotional and cognitive functioning.  We hold that people’s intelligence expands in the context of relationships that allow for play, emotional expression, attuned listening, co-regulation, and loving limits.

HiH now has a global reach, with certified instructors across six continents, materials translated into 12 languages, and more than 200,000 website visits monthly. 

Through listening and deep respect, we connect parents with one another, with the best in themselves, with their power to heal, and with the innate intelligence of their children.

We provide direct support to parents and professionals around the world, and through partnerships with other community organizations. 

We empower a global network of 167 trained instructors who understand the unique and specific needs of the communities where they live and serve. 

These homegrown leaders are the beating heart of HiH and include therapists, doctors, teachers, counselors, activists and parents from around the world using these trauma-informed tools to elevate their communities, which have included:

• Unhoused parents (Oakland, California, US)
• Teens who are pregnant or parenting (Austin, Texas, US)
• Parents struggling with addiction (Austin, Texas, US)
• Mothers living in slums (Mumbai, India)
• Survivors of domestic violence (California, US)
• Immigrant families (Watsonville, California, US)
• Parents impacted by COVID-19 (China, Hungary, Romania, France, US)
• Indigenous American families living on reservation land (US)
• Head Start and Early Head Start Communities (US)
• A preforming arts and cultural education center for children (rural Northern California, US)
• Arabic-speaking families (Dubai, UAE)
• Families living in communities vulnerable to gangs (Los Angeles, California, US)
• Children with developmental, cognitive and physical disabilities (US, Europe, Australia)
• The Roma community (Hungary)
• Parents in the prison system (US)
• Pediatric patients and their families (cities in Ohio and Michigan, US)  

Parents seek acceptance and emotional support. Children need support while they recover from adversity through crying, tantrums, and other emotional expression. We build parents’ understanding of these innate healing mechanisms by offering warmth and parent-to-parent listening in every class we teach. Parents feel the respect, and listening moves them toward change. 

Attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors don’t change via lecture, instruction, or demand. They change when one’s story is heard by someone who cares, and feelings are accepted and respected. Listening is an engine of change, a connective force in the family that reaches far beyond into communities and societies.

I’d been great with children since my own childhood. I was shocked when I began treating my 2-year-old harshly! I could scarcely control my own behavior.

One day, someone I hardly knew asked me how it was it to be a mom. 

I burst into tears and sobbed uncontrollably. She listened. She didn’t give advice. She was calm and attentive.

Afterward, I had plenty of patience. It was remarkable! She connected me with a peer-support organization to learn to listen in this way.

My first listening partner was a father whose wife had abandoned him and their 6-month old baby. We began listening to one another weekly. Our lives got better. Listening to others and being listened to was the most engaging thing I had ever done. But my children had struggles! How could listening help them?

Seven moms and I formed a preschool in my home to see how listening might help our children. From that effort and tens of thousands of additional listening hours and experiments came the Hand in Hand approach. 

This work addresses the hardest moments of my childhood, and has made me whole. Helping people overcome hurt that limits their lives is a remarkable privilege!

I was four when I first met my baby sister Mary Anne. I was filled with love and awe. My mother primed me to be her big sister, so I got to feed her, hold her, and fold her clothes. At seven months, she lost her ability to sit, to roll over. Then she couldn’t hold up her head or drink from a bottle. My mother worked over her night and day to no avail. My younger brother was neglected, and acted out. My father punished him harshly, and my brother could do no right ever again. 

Finally, they sent Mary Anne to a state hospital for care. My parents had no support during this grinding tragedy. It haunted them for decades. Under the strain, my mother became an invalid for almost 5 years. And I prayed for my sister every day. She died on my 13th birthday.

With limited cognitive skills, or awareness of others, Mary Anne showed me how precious each person is. I think my leadership stems from this certainty. Helping parents get the support they need during hard times and then reach for their off-track children, is simply what I want and love to do.

Raw Experience: I estimate I have done close to 40,000 hours of listening to parents and children in groups, in play, and one-on-one over the past 47 years. I have listened to parents and played with children in over 22 countries. 

Generational Experience: I know how our approach strengthens both children and parents over time.

Honed Skills: I have led up to 5000 parent support groups in many languages and cultures. I have taught on almost every continent. 

Written and Video Resources: I have authored over 120 articles and my Listening to Children publications have sold over 800,000 copies in many languages, including Chinese and Japanese. I have co-authored the book Listen: Five Simple Tools for Meeting Your Everyday Parenting Challenges with Tosha Schore, M.A., whom I trained. I have authored two comprehensive parenting curricula. I have created and produced eight Video Courses. 

I Win Parents’ Trust: I have built a global organization that has a high level of dedication, cooperation, support and generosity. I’ve trained exceptional people who change parents’ lives in many different contexts.

Our Approach is Simple yet Profound: It’s all about the human need for connection, and the human ability to heal from adversity, given listening and support. It’s adaptable. It’s not tied to any particular culture or class. 

The Tipping Point is Now: We’re poised to expand the parent-to-parent support model more widely into professional communities. This will bring the tools of deep listening and compassion to more people across the world. 

We were shocked to discover in late 2019 that a departed employee had not renewed our license to to issue Continuing Education Units (CEUs) for our Professionals Intensive Course in 2017. That person had told no one. 140 professionals had received false advertising, and some had received invalid, signed certificates!

Here's what I did:

I offloaded feelings of shame and anger in my Listening Partnerships throughout the process below.

I learned what we must do to issue valid CEUs by April 2020.

I informed our Board, staff and Instructors for possible upset. I took personal responsibility for the error.

I consulted with our liability insurance carrier. 

I consulted with a nonprofit lawyer about framing the message honestly.

I informed those affected of our error and their rights.

I apologized to those with a complaint. We compensated two professionals for CEUs lost. I covered one compensation personally to lighten the burden on Hand in Hand.

I worked days, nights, and on weekends in January, with staff assistance, to complete the 88-page application for accreditation to issue CEU units again.

We have improved procedures now at every level.

I am a white woman, raised in a town where there were no Black people. I have worked to bridge racial and class divides my whole life. 

I led a Black mothers’ support group and playgroup for their 20 children, for eight years. One new mom was about 40. She had diabetes, no teeth, two children, and no job. She sadly confessed to me she’d never learned to read. 

I told her I was sure she could learn to read. 

Every time it was her turn in our group, I’d ask her to stand tall and say, “I am one hell of a smart, Black woman.” She would burst into tears and cry long and hard while I lent her my confidence in her intelligence. My confidence sank in. Her hurt poured out.

By the end of the year she whispered to me that she had taught herself to read. 

The project manager told me it was the most successful program in their organization’s history. Those moms supported one another in the middle of the night, during crises, when it counted. They listened, they cared, and their children completed high school and were adults before planning families of their own.

When I first started Hand in Hand, I researched the option of founding the organization as a small business. I decided not to be involved in work with parents that would generate profit for individuals. I wanted the organization to be trusted as working for parents, and wanted its revenue to be used to foster outreach to stressed parents.

Our parenting approach is a revolutionary paradigm shift in the parenting world. We focus on preserving children’s innate instinct to love and cooperate. We help children release feelings of upset that jam their thinking and send their behavior off track. There’s no blame, there’s no shame: just connective responses to children’s signals for help. Of equal importance is our focus on listening to parents and helping them to build an emotional support system. They then can develop their best thinking, one challenge after the next, during their long parenting career.

This shift from telling children what to do, then using bribes, threats, or punishment to coerce them to do it, has profound implications for our society as a whole. One example: millions of people are presently incarcerated, many of them repeat offenders. It’s raw proof that punishment does not change minds, hearts, or behavior. It’s through relationships that we heal. Listening allows the mind to open. Each one receives, each one gives. Trust builds, and emotional release soon follows. This is how listening exchanges become a powerful engine of emotional, intellectual, and behavioral change.

We have found that peer listening with the common purpose of “I want to love my kids well” can provide flexible, no-cost, empowering relationships. Nurturing children well is a goal that unites parents across class, economic, racial, religious, political, and cultural divides. And listening melts those divides, healing much more than the individual issues parents bring to us. These changes, in our experience, are lasting.

Our tools are based on a peer support model. HiH has delivered support and teaching through parent-to-parent relationships. We have documented our impact in a collection of over 3000 written anecdotes from our instructors and others who have been touched by our work. Our 40 years of practice-based experience is woven into our books, articles, curricula, and videos, and into the experience of our Instructors worldwide. 

Ten years ago, we began training professionals, primarily in the mental health and education fields, so they could bring these tools to the families that they work with. 

Our ability to ‘go to scale’ by training professionals who can amplify our insights in their daily work depends upon our ability to rigorously document our impact and outcomes in quantitative terms. Focusing on the preschool setting, where teachers must handle children’s emotional episodes daily, we’ve begun a research project. We aim to identify the critical elements of our program, how our tools work in the preschool setting, for whom, and in what contexts. 

Our first step was to conduct a feasibility study, completed in December 2019. We want to incorporate the findings from that study into our training materials, then investigate outcomes in a pilot study as soon as possible. 

We posit that bringing the Hand in Hand approach to early childhood educators will give them the tools to help children who have faced adversity and are aching to offload the powerful emotions that burden them. We have indications from the feasibility study that other positive outcomes will flow: the tone of their classroom may improve, teachers’ relationships with others may benefit, and the changes in individual children's behavior will reward their caregivers in a meaningful way. 

We may be able to transfer findings from this project to improve our services for professionals in other disciplines. And we can use the same research methodology, devised by the Frontiers of Innovation group at Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child, in future research projects as we hone our materials and training methods for other disciplines and audiences.

We reach over 3 million per year via the internet; we served over 27,000 parents in 2019 with over 66,000 hours of support.
 
We think we can serve 50,000 parents in 2021, even under COVID conditions, and 250,000 by 2026. We currently define "served" as at least 1 hour of direct phone, zoom, video, or podcast-delivered contact with a Hand in Hand Instructor, or teaching about the Hand in Hand approach through video, podcasts, classes, talks, support groups, trainings, Q & A's, and Facebook Live interactions with parents.
 
We are becoming especially well known within Head Start communities in the US, the Conscious Parenting communities in the US and the UK, as well as in Romania and in some circles in China, where a Hand in Hand book has been on sale since 1999, and is in its third edition. Also available in China is the translation of our book, Listen: Five Simple Tools to Meet Your Everyday Parenting Challenges.
 
Our “served” estimate is quite conservative, as hundreds of thousands of parents return regularly to our website for articles, blogposts, literature, and video and audio resources in a number of languages. Over 235,000 parents currently interact with our various Facebook pages, our moderated online discussion group, and our Parent Club, but we do not count them as “served” unless the contact is such that their parenting questions could be answered in real time.
 
We are determined to develop better ways to quantify the impact we are making. 

We will build a strong, impactful organization by pursuing these goals:

Research

One year: Fund and conduct a pilot study. 

Five years: Become an evidence-based approach effective in preschool communities. Scale to preschools and Head Start programs across the US.

Instructor Support

One year: Clarify our business relationships and online advertising and social media policies with Instructors. 

Five years: Increase Instructor compensation. Enhance every Instructor’s leadership through a robust ongoing training program. Offer classes/resources in 12 major languages. 

Fundraising

One year: At least 1/3 of the 1,250 new donors who gave online in April 2020 give again by April 2021. 

Five years: Build and staff a Development department. Double the number of donors at all levels. Quadruple the number of parents making small donations. 

Diversity 

One year: Pilot Working for Racial Justice classes for white parents. Train eight instructors to lead them. Pilot Healing from Racism classes for parents of color. Reactivate COVID-19 free support call program in Fall 2020. 

Five years: Secure permanent funding for the work on racism and for free support calls for parents under stress. Train ten Black Instructors. Double the number of Muslim Instructors and the number of Muslim countries they teach in. Regular classes available online in Spanish and Arabic.

Growth

One year: Double the number of professionals taking our Professionals Intensive course. 

Five years: Successfully market and conduct regular in-person trainings for mental health, medical and early childhood professionals in many parts of the US and online.

There are challenges before us as we reach toward these goals:
 
1) Donor acquisition and retention. Our budget is split, about 50/50, between fee-for-service revenue and donations. Our budget for donor cultivation is now minimal, limiting our funds for growth.

2) Instructor support and training. We need to refine our business model to improve Instructor training and support to increase effectiveness. Good business consulting would help. We rely solely on volunteers for consulting.

3) Expanding cultural diversity. Our goal is effective work in Black and Latinx communities in the US, driven by culturally competent Instructors. Our current austerity budget, designed to ensure that Hand in Hand survives pandemic conditions, does not allow for a recruiter to bring outstanding individuals to our Instructor Certification Program.

4) Translations. Our core literature has been translated into many languages thanks to dedicated volunteers. We need the translations to be published at a rate faster than we, with zero budget for this, can manage.

5) Marketing. Word of mouth is our strongest tool. Our website and Facebook are second. We cannot now afford the redesign our website needs, and Facebook's policies are increasingly problematic. We currently have less than ¼ of our pre-COVID marketing budget with which to develop Instructors’ entrepreneurial skills, devise new online strategies, and develop marketing to professionals in the mental health, early childhood education, community outreach and medical fields.

Obtain help with fund development, to ground us as a sustainable organization that can build capacity, even during challenging economic times. 

Obtain professional business consulting to help us take best advantage of the skills and dedication of our Instructors, who want to teach more classes and be more effective in disseminating our expertise and support for stressed parents.

Recruit, connect, and train Instructors of color in the US, and Instructors with early childhood education experience, to develop culturally and professionally competent programs for the coming work in underserved communities. 

Fund materials adaptation and the design of a pilot study to be conducted in early 2021. We would use the prize to strengthen our case with other foundations that could provide on-going funding. The aim of the study is to adapt our classes to the needs of preschool teachers first, and within five years, administrators and parents in preschool communities.

Strengthen our board through the connections and added visibility this prize brings.

Devise effective ways to measure our impact.

Find ways to disseminate our trove of over 3000 written parent stories of success using our approach to solve a wide variety of parenting challenges in many different countries and cultures. 

Make our website more accessible and searchable for parents looking for help with their child's behavioral issue.

Learn everything we can from the influencers, industry leaders, and experts made available by the Elevate Foundation.

We are partnering with the organizations below in a variety of ways, including providing professional development trainings, parent trainings, support groups and member outreach:

Family Resources Center (California, US)

First 5 California (US)

Head Start/Early Head Start Programs (New England States, US)

Community Overcoming Relationship Abuse (CORA) (California, US)

Dolores Mission Empowerment Project (Southern California, US)

Casa De Aprendizaje Family Day Care Home (California, US)

Northwest Indian College (Washington, US)

School of Performing Arts & Cultural Education (SPACE) (California, US)

Project ABC (About Building Connections) (Los Angeles, California, US) 

Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child Frontiers of Innovation Project Community (Massachusetts, US)

Mercy St. Vincent Medical Center, in partnership with the Ohio Department of Health (Ohio, US)

Bureau for Children with Medical Handicaps (BCMH) and Family Voices of Ohio (Ohio, US)

Kaiser Permanente (California, US)

Portsmouth Abuse and Rape Counseling Service (United Kingdom)

Embercombe (UK’s first Ecorestoration Camp) 

Clalit Healthcare (Largest health agency in Israel)

Creating Trauma Sensitive Schools Conference (Atlanta, Georgia, US)

Southern New Hampshire Services Head Start/Early Head Start Programs, Nashua, New Hampshire, US)

The Portland Institute for Innovations in Early Childhood Mental Health and Education (Portland, Maine, US)

Pathways, Inc. Head Start/Early Head Start Programs (Gloucester, Massachusetts, US)

We serve parents worldwide, offering free services and information, as well as fee-based products. 

Our Beneficiaries: children who have faced adversity; parents who feel, “What do I do with this kid?!”; professionals serving parents and children.

Basic Resources: well-tested, parent-friendly, adaptable parenting approach, extensive written and video resources; online learning communities involving 17,000 parents; 217,000 Facebook followers; over 100 instructors in 17 countries; a trusted brand; dedicated donors.    

Key Activities: interacting with parents in person and via 12 online portals. See below.

Profit Formula:

Fee-based offerings for parents and professionals

Program-related income is $400-500K yearly. Our cost is over $350K to provide services. 

Fee for service
Subscription - Parent Club, Instructor Hub, Candidate Hub
Licensing – fees for materials for each class
E-commerce - booklets, books, video classes, audio, three online curricula
Consultations
Free services 
Articles; blog; newsletter; podcasts; Facebook groups; talks, online video events

Donors

Donors contribute $300-400K yearly

Major Donor Fundraising - personal solicitations, events, letters, donor webinars

Online campaigns for small donations

Key Resources

Talented staff, deep institutional knowledge
Quality information and products
Passionate instructors, many of them professionals
Engaged, high-converting social media following
Longevity in field
Interns contribute additional resources 

Key Processes

Established and tracked NPS (Net Promoter Score)
Regular surveys, tracking of changes in data
Multi-stage testing and evaluation of product development, marketing
Extensive online advertising data history
Regular lead generation through website, promotions, and giveaways
Active email list with robust automated email campaigns

Our current plan for sustainability has three initiatives:

1)    Tailor our services to the needs of professionals. To take our work to scale we need to develop trainings that address the work and the key issues of professionals. They can serve numbers of parents and children on a daily basis, and we can increase their work satisfaction greatly.

In particular, we will develop a highly effective course in our approach for preschool educators, including Head Start teachers. We want to demonstrate the transformative power of listening in the classroom where emotional understanding is needed most.  

2)    Build a Development Department, and train staff and instructors in inspiring parents to support our broad vision: Change parenting, and you change the world!  We need to devote staff time and attention to cultivating donors and appreciating them. We want to elevate fundraising to a strong and vital arm of Hand in Hand. 

3)    Support our Instructors with a strong business plan, clear marketing policies, and inspiring ongoing education and support. The internet is a wild place; Facebook policies, in particular, can be problematic. We must move quickly, and obtain excellent consulting to help us meet the short- and long-range challenges of marketing ideas on the internet, so our Instructors can be both successful and ethical in their outreach to parents.

In 2019, Hand in Hand raised:

$400k from individual donors, with individual gifts ranging from $40,000 down to $10.

$150k from online classes, digital materials and literature sales.

$88k from the Parent Club, a subscription service that brings parents an engaged and supportive online learning community, weekly Q & A conference calls, answers to periodic parenting challenges, and closely moderated online coaching and support from experienced instructors. 

$100k from our Instructor Certification course, in which we train promising parent leaders from around the world in the Hand in Hand approach, in preparation for becoming instructors in their communities.

$35k from individual parent-to-parent consultations, usually conducted by phone. 

All sales from our books and classes are used to create more resources, run parenting workshops within underserved communities, and for scholarships for parents who need financial support to take Hand in Hand Parenting classes. In addition, 10% of the income from fees for our Instructor Certification Course is dedicated to lowering the fee for parents who cannot pay the full rate.

As a nonprofit organization, we continually seek funds to bring transformative information, tools, and support to parents to better their lives and their children’s lives. 

Overall, we plan to raise $290K from donors this year, $160K of which has already come in. We estimate we will bring in $240K in earned income, $126K of which has been banked. And we received $77K from the Paycheck Protection Program, which will be used toward salaries, and so will be forgivable. 

We are planning an early pilot study of our course for Early Childhood Educators, for which we must raise around $170K as quickly as possible. After that, we’ll do a pilot study that will cost about $250K. 

We have applied to the Caplan Foundation for $50,000 to support our early pilot study, and have not heard back yet. We also applied to the American Psychological Foundation for $30,000 to research the outcomes of the 90 + support calls for parents HiH offered in response to parents’ struggles with the COVID shutdown. We did not receive that grant.

We are using each grant application as an opportunity to learn to articulate our vision, and describe our approach. We will get better at conveying its significance in the evolution of human understanding, and how putting connection at the center of the nurture of children can foster broad cooperation across traditional divides.

Hand in Hand Estimated Expenses Summary, 2020

General Operating Expenses: website, telecom, insurances, rent, fees, accounting, software - $46,800

Salaries/wages, benefits, payroll taxes, credit card processing fees -            $240,500

One-time Expense: credit card debt from 2019 - $50,000

Our operating expenses for 2019 were $527,572. This year we’ve budgeted expenses at $287,334, a 46% reduction achieved through cuts in salaries, hours worked, and trimmed benefits, by engaging volunteers, by cutting marketing costs, and by consolidating the apps used in administration and finance. Our dedicated staff has enabled us to bring our budget into alignment with our projected income, and we estimate we will be debt-free by December 2020. This was our first encounter with debt in 30 years, and we are making it as brief an experience as possible.

Salaries cover these positions: Administrative Director (PT), Administrative Assistant (PT), Communications Director (PT), Online Content Manager (PT), and Program Director (FT) who is working this year for no salary. In addition, we are about to hire two additional part time employees who have been working under contract: the Certification Program Manager and the Parent Club Manager. 

The numerous part-time positions reflect our austerity budget, designed to help us ride out the recession and continue our services to parents and professionals.

Hand in Hand has the potential to change parents' lives and give them the tools and support to lift hurt, fear, anger, and discouragement from their children's lives. Our world-wide reach is striking, given that our approach has historically been communicated parent-to-parent and our services offered through a peer-support model. However, we’ve been underfunded from the start, in part because the ideas we bring don’t mesh with the "rewards-and-punishment" mindset of commonly used parenting approaches. The necessary basic research needed to undergird and amplify the validity of our approach has not yet been done.

The Elevate Prize would enhance our visibility, giving us the expertise, learning opportunities, financial resources, and communications strategy to let parents know we are here and ready to support them. Our Instructors would have more visibility, as would our services. We would have the funds to pursue our research objectives, firmly grounding our work in science, which would allow organizations committed to evidence-based practice to incorporate our tools. 

The paradigm change we employ daily cannot be imagined before it is seen and felt. When one sees one's child "become themselves again" after being listened to through an intense emotional episode, one finally grasps the power of a child's innate emotional healing process, and how a parent's support can affect truly transformative change. The Hand in Hand Parenting "Listening Tools" and the emotional support they foster can change parenting, which can in turn change the world.

We would like to:

Conduct a pilot study to adapt our classes to the needs of preschool teachers, administrators and parents in preschool communities.

Establish an evidence base for our program.

Obtain professional business consulting to help us take best advantage of the skills and dedication of our Instructors.

Obtain help with fund development, to ground us as a sustainable organization that can build capacity, even during challenging economic times. 

Strengthen our board through the connections and added visibility this prize brings.

Recruit, connect and train Instructors of color in the US, to develop culturally and professionally competent Instructors for work with underserved communities.

Devise effective ways to measure our impact.

Find ways to disseminate our trove of over 3000 written parent stories of success using our approach to solve a wide variety of parenting challenges in many different countries and cultures. 

Make our website more accessible.

We would like to continue to partner with the Frontiers of Innovation Program at Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child to refine our long-term research plan and conduct a series of pilot studies in underserved communities in alignment with the rapid-cycle iterative research model we have been trained in. Their mentoring has been critical as we develop a robust plan for community-engaged research that will help our program become an evidence-based program where we are continuously refining our theory of change, our tools, and our trainings, and bringing this program to worldwide scale.

We would also like to explore collaborations with the following organizations whose work we admire and whose philosophies are in alignment with our values...

The Trauma Research Foundation (Boston, MA, US)
32nd International Boston Trauma Conference (US)
Early Head Start and Head Start Communities (US)
Neonatal Intensive Care Units Follow-up Clinics (US)
Jewish Education Organizations (Maryland, US)
Early Childhood Education Certification Programs (US)
Mental Health Professionals (worldwide)
Social Justice Organizations (worldwide)
Place2be (children’s mental health) (UK)
Build Trust (The Netherlands)