Initiative Expected to Have Long-Term Impact on Success
The effort to help children and families in Elkhart County has deep roots over decades, but doing it this way is new.
Bringing organizations together to collaborate and work at the systems level to prepare children for kindergarten under an umbrella called Building Strong Brains is a recent effort that’s quickly gaining momentum.
Building Strong Brains has a simple goal that will require a decade or more of work to shift systems.
Candy Yoder, the Community Foundation’s chief program officer, has spent most of her four-decade career supporting children and their families in Elkhart County. “In all of my work with families over the years, I found parents who wanted the best possible outcomes for their kids and a number of parents who didn’t have access to the resources or had other issues that got in the way of doing what they wanted to do for their children,” she says. “It’s not because parents don’t care. It’s not because of potential. It’s because there are a lot of barriers and burdens.”
Kimberly Boynton, coalition director of Building Strong Brains, adds, “Every parent and caregiver wants the best for their child. Accessibility is a huge component to consider. Community support is needed for children and families.”
Elkhart County has a number of organizations supporting children and families, but there are things that a school or nonprofit can’t do on their own. Building Strong Brains is about approaching the work differently and doing it together. “The power of convening has been shown over and over again,” says Boynton. “There’s been a real power and leveraging that has come out of people convening together.”
A growing number of people and organizations are collaborating to prepare students for success in Elkhart County.
After several years of careful work to build a coalition, Building Strong Brains launched in 2022. Less than two years later, it is seeing “astonishing growth,” according to Rebecca Stoltzfus, president of Goshen College and a leader in Building Strong Brains as co-chair of the Leadership Table, convener of the Health Systems Alignment Team, and a member of the steering team.
Stoltzfus said anchor institutions in our county are coming together to address an issue for vulnerable children who would otherwise be voiceless. There’s a moral foundation for the work, as well as a practical economic and social one. “Without our young children being healthy and literally building strong brains, we have a diminished future,” she says.
The structure of the coalition continues to grow and evolve from the initial five organizations of the Community Foundation, Horizon Education Alliance, CAPS, Crossroads United Way, and The SOURCE (Oaklawn). Representatives from more than 50 organizations are now engaged in the work.
Sometimes, those organizations are competitors on other fronts, but joining to work together on this one. Backbone support, which connects, communicates, and convenes, is what’s different from the past.
“Because of backbone support training, and education on working as a system, we are seeing some changes in mindsets and belief that we all win if we make this change together,” says Yoder. Executives from the four major medical providers in Elkhart County are gathering to work on early childhood success together. Information is flowing between executives and the Maternal and Child Health Action Team.
Building Strong Brains is supporting Elkhart County’s parents and children.
Elkhart County lags in the state and nationally on infant mortality and maternal health, which health systems can address. A growing body of data being collected will help inform other decisions.
Childcare in Elkhart County isn’t accessible or affordable — as in other communities — so networking opportunities and professional development are being offered for childcare directors, but policy change and more money available at the state level would have a bigger impact than local efforts, says Yoder.
How collaboration is happening can be illustrated with how a kindergarten readiness checklist was shared. A school social worker in Bristol asked in an action team meeting if someone had one and someone responded that Sonya Overman, Growing Readers supervisor at Elkhart Public Library, had one. Soon it was available in both English and Spanish in this network.
That grassroots work will soon change how ready students are to learn and succeed as they enter school. “There is momentum around this work being done where conversations are happening so that things do look different in the future,” says Boynton.
This story appeared in the 2024 Annual Report.
