Ready to Nurture Our Next Chapter
Everything we do here at Prevent Child Abuse Tennessee is about nurturing. We provide services that give children and their families in Tennessee a promising and prosperous future. Our goal is for all children in Tennessee to grow up in an environment that will help them thrive. But to provide those services and achieve that goal, we have to nurture ourselves too by investing in organizational changes that will allow us to broaden our reach. We made some great strides toward this in 2019 and we have much to look forward to in 2020.
A LOOK BACK AT 2019
We are so grateful for what 2019 brought us. Through our advocacy efforts, an extra $1 million in state funding was secured for families that are disadvantaged to receive parenting support. We expanded our coverage of after-hours calls for domestic violence shelters around the state by 29%, so that shelter workers could decrease the number of hours they were on-call. Our community stepped up to provide thousands of safety items like diapers, car seats, winter jackets, and safe places for babies to sleep that our staff could deliver to families in need.
As our communities here in Tennessee are growing more diverse, the families we serve are as well. We are committed to providing the same high-quality support to all of our families, including those who are not native English speakers. In 2019, we served families who speak Arabic, Spanish, Swahili, Nepali and other languages, using in-person interpreters during their home visits. Due to demand for these services, we even hired full-time home visitor staff who are fluent in Spanish and Arabic. We had 677 home visits with non-English speaking families, providing one-on-one support for these families who are especially vulnerable.
BIG CHANGES TO COME
We know Tennessee families are benefiting from our walk alongside them as they raise their young children. We also know there are many more families in Tennessee who could benefit from our expertise and support that aren’t currently connected to our work. As we enter a new decade, our organization is getting ready to enter a new chapter—one that will allow us to serve families who have previously gone unserved.
With this new chapter, comes a major change for our organization. We will be taking on a new name and an entirely new brand in 2020. We want families and community partners to better understand what we help them do, rather than get distracted by what our work prevents. The official announcement of the new name will have to wait, but for now, we’ll share that our new identity will emphasize the importance of nurturing the next generation. Our early childhoods set the course for much of how we develop as people. Well-nurtured children grow into well-adjusted adults. And that is what drives our work.
Our board is currently crafting a new strategic plan that will guide what our work looks like over the next few years. Beyond a new name, we plan to embrace new innovative ways to engage with families. We look forward to sharing forthcoming details with you over the next year and continuing to nurture the seeds of change we sow with families every day.