How Neighborhood Villages is helping children and families through the migrant crisis

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is facing an unprecedented crisis in its shelter system, which, for the first time, has reached its capacity. Nearly 7,500 families are being temporarily housed in more than 100 shelters and hotels across the state. A combination of the preexisting housing shortage across the state and an influx of new immigrants into Massachusetts, most of whom are leaving unsafe conditions in their home countries, has overwhelmed the Commonwealth’s emergency assistance programs. This population includes an estimated 5,000 under-school-age children (0-5). They have experienced toxic levels of stress during migration and, as winter approaches, these children are experiencing a desperate need for essential items and core health and human services. Crucially, these very young children are also in need of nurturing, trauma-informed learning environments where they can play, seek comfort, and be in community with children and nurturing caregivers. Unfortunately, no such early education system awaits them.

As the Commonwealth has rallied to figure out how to best serve these families, almost all of whom have children, it has found steady partners in K-12 school districts, which have infrastructure to help families in need and connect them with key services. Over the past months, staff from K-12 districts have come to the shelters to register the 6–18-year-olds for school, get to know families, and help folks begin their lives in America.  Indeed, districts and after school programs have undertaken herculean efforts to welcome these children and knit them into the fabric of their communities. However, for families with children younger than 6, navigating and accessing available services – educational or otherwise – has not been so seamless. In contrast to the K-12 public school system, the 0-5 early childhood education (ECE) sector, in the Commonwealth and throughout the country, lacks such districts or meaningful supportive systems infrastructure.

When it comes to early education and care, there is no centralized system designed to identify children, enroll them in care, and connect their families to other social safety net programs for which they are eligible. Notably, care may not even be available at all. Very young children have no right, nor guaranteed access, to an early education and thousands of children live in child care deserts, where there are no or too few providers to meet demand for child care. This has led to significant barriers for Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey’s administration with respect to addressing the significant needs of families with young children living in the Commonwealth’s overburdened shelter system. 

The stark difference in capacity to meet the needs of families with children ages 6-18 vs. 0-5 at this moment recalls the challenges the Commonwealth, and states across the country, faced during the pandemic.  As K-12 districts rolled out infrastructure to administer the health and safety protocols and conduct COVID-19 testing, the ECE system received no such support for implementing those same safety protocols and struggled daily to meet the needs of vulnerable children and families and the educators who care for them. In response, in 2020-21, Neighborhood Villages stepped in to the fill the gap and established a first-of-its kind testing protocol for the sector, which scaled statewide in partnership with the Commonwealth's Department of Early Education and Care (EEC). The organization also sourced and delivered hundreds of thousands of diapers, material goods, and nutrition supports to hundreds of families with very young children. Months later, when there was a national shortage of baby formula, we used the same infrastructure to deliver 700 pounds of formula to our partners centers across Boston to provide to the 850 families they serve.

Now, as Massachusetts navigates how to house and provide services to thousands of families experiencing homelessness, Neighborhood Villages, a trusted design and implementation partner, is closely collaborating with the Healey administration on a number of interventions to bolster capacity to meet the needs of the families and young children that are living in the state’s overburdened shelter system. In the past few months, Neighborhood Villages has distributed thousands of diapers and supported the Commonwealth in setting up a translation hotline for the ECE sector and is actively working in an advisory capacity to the Governor’s Office, Executive Office of Education, and Incident Command Team, which is guiding emergency response efforts across the state.  

In the weeks to come, Neighborhood Villages is partnering with Cradles 2 Crayons, Horizons for Homeless Children, and the Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care to collectively address the durable goods needs of young children as temperatures drop, distributing urgently needed winter clothing, gear, and learning supplies. Neighborhood Villages’ role includes the sourcing of materials, coordination of logistics, and provision of operations support. Reaching approximately 9,000 children, this highly collaborative and innovative effort is anticipated to serve approximately 94 hotel sites and 71 traditional shelters/scattered sites through the end of the calendar year. A second delivery of items is planned for the spring, including seasonally appropriate clothing, pajamas, socks, underwear, sneakers, and hygiene kits.  

To address longer term needs of families with children younger than 6 living in shelters, Neighborhood Villages will work with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to design and pilot mobile learning spaces to address the need for coordinated social and health service delivery for families, and urgently needed trauma-informed education, care, and mental health supports for young children. To do this work, we will be partnering with Amal Alliance - which specializes in supporting children who've been displaced - to design meaningful, bespoke mobile programming to serve families with young children living in these new scattered-site shelters. Together, we will bring not only early learning programming to children in shelter, but also many of the wraparound family supports – such as family navigation – that Neighborhood Villages’ currently offers in its Neighborhood program, a partnership with five early education centers in Boston designed to bolster the capacity of the ECE delivery system in Massachusetts. 

As Massachusetts faces it’s second state of emergency in three years, we look forward to working in partnership with the Healey Administration, Horizons for Homeless Children, and other early childhood education stakeholders, to help provide education and play-based resources and basic infrastructure to families with very young children. Early education is education and very young children – especially those who have experienced the trauma of homelessness – deserve the same access to educational opportunity and family security that government systems provide, by-right, to their older brothers and sisters. We hope you’ll join us in this effort.

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Neighborhood Villages is a Boston-based systems-change non-profit working to create a future in which all families have access to affordable, high-quality early education and care. Despite the critical role early childhood education (ECE) plays in the lives and prospects of children and families, it has long been undervalued in the United States and, as a result, the sector has been starved of the resources it needs to provide quality programming at affordable rates to families with young children (ages 0-5). Neighborhood Villages was founded in 2017 to respond to this endemic failure.