Neighborhood Villages Awarded Multi-Year $300,000 Grant from Boston Children’s Collaboration for Community Health

Funds will support Neighborhood Villages’ Family Navigation program, aimed at addressing barriers to health equity for young children and families.

BOSTON (September 22, 2021) — Neighborhood Villages, a systems-change non-profit working to realize a future in which all families have access to affordable, high-quality early education and care, today was awarded funding from the Boston Children’s Collaboration for Community Health.

The $300,000 grant will support Neighborhood Villages’ Family Navigation model, which strengthens the capacity of early education and care programs to provide health, housing, and nutrition supports to families, to promote family security and prosperity.

“The generosity of Boston Children's Collaboration for Community Health makes such a huge impact on children and families in Greater Boston and across the state,” says Lauren Kennedy, Co-President of Neighborhood Villages. “We’re thrilled to become a funded partner of the Collaboration and to utilize this grant to invest in early education and care providers and their ability to meet the full-scope needs of the children and families they serve.”

“With their close personal relationships with children and parents, early education and care centers are uniquely positioned to identify and respond to the needs of vulnerable families.  In fact, early learning centers are an ideal setting to offer a wide range of family supports in a way that facilitates health, wellbeing, and security,” says Shari Nethersole, MD, Executive Director for Community Health at Boston Children’s Hospital. “However, the majority of early education and care providers, particularly those that serve economically disadvantaged families, have neither the budget nor workforce to provide these supports at full potential.  We are proud to support Neighborhood Villages and this innovative program, which promotes health equity and whole-family wellbeing.”  

The grant will enable Neighborhood Villages to fund a network of Family Navigators at five child care centers across Boston.  Family Navigators will work to identify needs early-on and thereby prevent vulnerabilities from transitioning into crises.  “Our hope,” said Sarah Muncey, Co-President with Kennedy, “is to demonstrate how, at a statewide level, increased public investment in the sector could help to deliver not only high-quality early education and care, but also comprehensive wraparound services tailored to meet the needs of individual communities, as well.”

Neighborhood Villages, founded in 2017 by Lauren Kennedy and Sarah Muncey, is a Boston-based systems-change non-profit that advocates for early education and care policy reform and implements scalable solutions that address the biggest challenges facing providers and the families who rely on them. Neighborhood Villages is also part of the Common Start Coalition that has filed Massachusetts legislation (H.605 and S.362)  that would establish a system of affordable, high-quality early education and child care for all Massachusetts families, over a 5-year timeline. For more information, visit https://www.neighborhoodvillages.org/our-work.