Growing Up Healthy

Supported by Healthy Community Initiative (HCI), Growing Up Healthy (GUH) is dedicated to promoting an inclusive atmosphere for diverse populations to connect with each other and to actively participate in creating a community where all families thrive in Rice County. They work with partner organizations and Latinx, immigrant, and refugee families to transform communities by cultivating neighborhood leadership, fostering social connectedness, and collectively advocating for systemic change. The work between Growing Up Healthy and St. Olaf has primarily through internships, however, in this fall 2020, they collaborated with an ACE course (PSYCH 341: Infant Development) taught by Professor Dana Gross.

Several years ago, HCI received funding for their Early Childhood Navigators (ECN) program. The primary goal of ECN is to help families with children ages three to kindergarten navigate opportunities and resources, including early childhood screening and preschool enrollment. Bilingual staff members in Northfield aim to seek out 3- to 5-year-olds who are not connected to an early childhood experience and to get them screened by age 3 ½. Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, home visits have been replaced with virtual visits.

Students enrolled in PSYCH 341: Infant Development mainly worked on making activity bags for children aged 0-3 years. They worked individually and in teams to apply course concepts about infant behavior and development to create age-appropriate activity bags for GUH and ECN to drop off with families. GUH and PreK teachers then connected with the families and guided them through activities for using the activity bags. In addition, students also created short videos about infant behavior and development for the GUH youtube channel.

“As a nonprofit in a college town, having the support we’ve received over the years from the students and faculty at St. Olaf and Carleton has been an essential ingredient to our sustained success,” Sandy Malecha, the senior director of HCI, told the ACE office.

She has also shared her own reflection from partnering with St.Olaf this term:

Half the battle this year during the pandemic has been to ensure our Growing Up Healthy team knows that they are not alone in their efforts to serve the community. St. Olaf students dedicating time to learning about our program and the families they serve meant a lot. Knowing the Oles themselves were working through incredible obstacles this semester, their partnership meant even more. St. Olaf students ended up delivering valuable resources for families and supplied HCI with helpful tools that will benefit families in the future. These partnerships have had a significant impact on our ability to do this work – raising up our data/research efforts, helping us expand our reach, and offering a heightened level of visibility to our work outside of Rice County. From our internship, ACE, and fellowship experiences, we’ve later hired additional interns (students sharing word-of-mouth with friends) and graduates (promise fellows, full-time hires) from the colleges.