Our Goal
We wanted to help healthcare and early childhood education professionals serving vulnerable populations maximize their skills and abilities to make a difference.
The Importance of Professional Development
Federal and state officials increasingly have made workforce development a priority. For example, in the field of early childhood care and education, the U.S. Department of Education and the New Jersey Department of Education invested significant Race to the Top funds to provide training and technical assistance for early childhood professionals. In healthcare, residency programs were being transformed to help future physicians place a greater emphasis on meeting community-level needs. Programs that “train the trainers” have especially powerful downstream effects, influencing many lives for a relatively small investment.
A grant from The Nicholson Foundation supported the creation of a Project ECHO Academic Medical Center Hub in New Jersey.
What We Did
The Nicholson Foundation fostered professional development by funding high-impact programs that provided training, coaching, and mentoring to enhance the skills and expertise of current and emerging health and early childhood professionals. Projects we funded prepared professionals to move from “pipeline to practice”—putting their knowledge to use on the front lines of service delivery.
Our work in this area included:
- Funding the Transforming Early Childhood Leadership Institute for school leaders, teachers, and central office staff from 30 schools across districts that offer Pre-K to Grade 3 instruction to children from vulnerable populations.
- Supporting the creation of New Jersey’s Project ECHO Academic Medical Center Hub. Project ECHO uses telecommunications technology and case-based learning to foster mentoring partnerships between specialists and primary care providers, thereby enhancing primary care providers’ skills, knowledge, and capacity to deliver quality care to their patients.
- Supporting Rowan University’s Early Childhood Leadership Building Program, which aims to increase leadership capacity across New Jersey’s early childhood field.