At Family Services, we are passionate about ensuring that every child and family in Forsyth County is safe, secure and able to reach his or her full potential — especially our youngest children and their parents who are stranded on the far side of opportunities that could help them escape the generational cycle of living in poverty.
Like Kayla, and her mom —a single parent who desperately wanted to earn her associate’s degree so that she could apply for a better job and provide a more stable environment for her young daughter.
Thankfully, because of our partnership with the Wake Forest Downtown Health Plaza, she heard about Family Services’ child development programs and services, and enrolled her daughter in Head Start.
With Kayla in a quality preschool, her mom could attend classes and keep her part-time job. She also benefitted from having a family advocate who shared valuable resources that helped her set goals and work hard toward self-sufficiency.
Kayla benefitted, too. She received early childhood developmental attention in the first five years of her life – that critical, once-only window of opportunity to build an unshakable foundation for cognitive, emotional, social and behavioral health that will last her lifetime.
IT’S WORKING!
But, it almost didn’t happen.
That’s why we are working with the community to ensure that our critical programs and services remain strong.
There are 24,000 children under age 5 in Forsyth County. More than 8,000 of them are growing up under the constant stress and pressures of living in poverty.
Science has proven that, if left unaddressed in young children, these conditions will lead to emotional, social, behavioral, health and learning problems that can follow them into adulthood.
Evidence also shows that these children can benefit from our quality early childhood development programs.
Yet limited public funding is not meeting the needs of our most vulnerable local preschoolers. Too many local children are on waiting lists for our services.
The good news is — our community can turn this around.
Supporting Family Services enables children and families in crisis achieve stability, educational success, emotional independence, and the American dream.
You’ve seen this at work in a number of ways:
- As four-year-olds from our child development programs enter kindergarten prepared to learn and eager to succeed.
- As three-year-olds learn the social and emotional skills that help them overcome the effects of traumatic experiences and begin to thrive.
- As hardworking moms and dads, living in poverty, discover resources to help their young children, and gain the confidence to become the parents they long to be.
Every child and family in our community should have access to these opportunities.
But they do not.
Our community has the power to increase access to programs and services that will help more children and families.
Every day, we celebrate the progress our community is making to close the “opportunity gap” in Forsyth County. But there is still more work to be done as one-third of our children under age 5 remain stranded on the far side of opportunities that will help them thrive. Learn how you can help expand the solutions that are working at familyservicesforsyth.orgor call 336.722.8173.
