Eco-Healthy’s Message is in Demand!

By Kathy Attar, Engagement Manager, Eco-Healthy Child Care®

In May, we presented our eco-healthy curriculum for the first time to child care providers and other child care professionals via a new partnership with the National Center on Early Childhood Health and Wellness. The Center targets child care programs serving high-risk, low-income children from birth to age 5, as well as pregnant women. 

The Center is a collaboration of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Georgetown University Center for Child and Human Development, National Maternal and Child Oral Health Resource Center, Education Development Center, Inc., and Health Care Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles and is jointly administered by the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Head Start in partnership with the Office of Child Care.

The overwhelming interest from child care professionals in how to create and maintain healthier and eco-friendly child care settings is apparent! We had over 7,000 folks register for the May webinar. The webinar was recorded–please check it out and share widely with your networks!

Reaching child care providers who serve low-income communities and communities of color is a priority for the Eco-Healthy Child Care® program. We know that health disparities exist–-rates of asthma, obesity, childhood cancer and certain learning disabilities are higher amongst poorer children and children of color. The science linking poor health to exposure to environmental hazards is strong and continues to grow. The data also shows that underserved and at-risk populations have greater exposures to environmental hazards like dirty air, unsafe water and harmful chemicals in consumer products. 

Greatly reducing exposures to known environmental hazards within early learning settings can help protect the health of our most vulnerable children. Increasing awareness amongst child care providers about the link between unsafe plastics, pesticides and harmful chemicals found in cleaning supplies is a first step towards changing practices and creating safer child care settings. 

Eco-Healthy Child Care® has played a key role in incorporating environmental health and safety best practices into the National Resource Center for Health and Safety in Child Care and Early Education (NRC) Caring for Our Children (CFOC) standards. EHCC seeks to also partner with the Administration for Children and Families, Office of Head Start to change child care guidelines within Head Start and Early Head Start programs. Incorporating environmental health best practices from our eco-healthy checklist into these guidelines will create longer-term and farther-reaching change for some of our nation’s most vulnerable children.

Are you wanting to increase your knowledge and awareness of eco-healthy best practices? Check out our free Fact-Sheets, FAQs and Checklist!

Behind the Scenes: How Partnerships Elevate the Impactfulness of Our Work 

By Hester Paul, National Director, Eco-Healthy Child Care®

We are a small national non-profit organization dedicated to protecting the environmental health of all children. The world of child care is enormous and nebulous. Each county or state has its own playbook on how to regulate and license local child care programs. To make things more challenging, there are many types of child care or early care and learning environments in every county and state, including: center-based child care, home-based child care, Head Start facilities and Early Head Start programs for example. In order to influence and make change, the Eco-Healthy Child Care® program must be strategic and collaborative. We greatly value our partners.

Working with groups that are a part of or represent our most vulnerable communities–children, communities of color and low-income communities–is key to ensuring the solutions we craft are equitable, address the root causes of problems and can reach our intended audience.

In May of this year, for the first time ever, Eco-Healthy Child Care® presented a portion of our environmental health curriculum to child care professionals on a webinar hosted by the National Center on Early Childhood Health and Wellness. The Center targets child care programs serving high-risk, low-income children from birth to age 5, as well as pregnant women. We hope to build on this collaboration to eventually strengthen environmental health best practices within Head Start and Early Head Start child care guidelines.

We have partnered with the Pediatric Environmental Health Specialty Unit for Region Two to bring our 5 hour train-the-trainer course to Head Start and Early Head Start facilities in Puerto Rico. The Eco-Healthy Child Care® training curriculum comprehensively covers environmental health hazards commonly found within and around child care settings. To date the training has been provided in 33 states. Evaluations collected indicate that 86% of participants feel that our training was “extremely effective” at equipping them to become successful environmental health advocates.

Embedding our science-based best practices into national child care standards and their respective systems is a strategic way to integrate environmental health considerations for the long term. In 2016, we collaborated with the National Association for the Education of Young Children, a national accreditation body for center-based child care professionals that has over 80,000 members, to update their Early Childhood Program Standards and Accreditation Criteria to include more comprehensive best practices in environmental health. At the completion of this project, 31 new indicators focused on environmental health were generated and released. 

Working with governmental agencies allows us to engage with a wide variety of stakeholders. To encourage more states to consider, develop and adopt best practices for preventing potential exposures to environmental hazards at early learning settings, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, a branch of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, developed the Choose Safe Places for Early Care and Education program. The program’s goal is to ensure child care facilities are located in safe locations – away from sites with environmental contamination or polluting industries (such as: nail salons, gas stations, funeral homes and drycleaners). In 2017, in partnership with the Environmental Law Institute and the National Association of County and City Health Officials EHCC began providing capacity building support to 25 state health departments as they create and implement safe siting programs in their respective states.

Child care systems are always looking for strategies to incentivize best practices in care.  Quality Rating Improvement Systems (QRIS) are offered in each state; they provide a  non-regulatory framework for building and maintaining high quality early care and education programs. In August 2015, Maryland incorporated the Eco-Healthy Child Care® program into their state QRIS, Maryland EXCELS, by offering an Eco-Friendly Achievement Program “Eco-Friendly” badge for licensed child care facilities.

Are you looking to get involved in our eco-healthy work? Sign-up to receive monthly eco-hot tip emails. If you are a child care provider, apply to become an eco-healthy endorsed facility!