Training Programs

Early Care & Management Training

ECLC’s Early Care Management Training, Director’s Institute and workshops support child care center directors in all counties across the state by training both new and experienced child care center directors in all topics essential to running a safe, high quality program.

ECLC staff trainers and CCR&R trainers offer a statewide calendar of virtual and in-person Management Training workshops for Child Care Center and School Age Care Directors. ECLC provides five core Management Trainings that make up the Director’s Institute:

  1. Director’s Overview
  2. Fiscal Management: The Budget
  3. The Director’s Role in Ensuring Developmentally Appropriate Practice
  4. Orientation: The Process to Staff Integration
  5. Strengthening Supervisory Skills
Workshops are provided through the Regional Collaboration to Promote Quality in Early Childhood Services. Supported by the New York State Office of Children and Family Services (OCFS), the Early Care & Learning Council’s Management Training workshops provide training and technical assistance designed to help center directors meet these challenges.

These programs are offered to all center directors and CCR&R staff members at no cost.


Contact Mariah Hebert for more information on Management Trainings and the Director’s Institute.

Preschool Development Grant Birth Through Five Initiative (PDGB5)

Blending & Braiding

This training is designed for Center and SACC directors, board members and finance staff to help them identify different types and sources of funding and combine those sources of funding to serve a diverse population with a variety of needs. An overview of the Blending and Braiding Curriculum, which defines the terms blending and braiding, describes the stages required to develop a Blended and Braided fiscal model. 

The Braiding and Blending training series develops a Train the Trainer protocol based upon the NYS Braiding and Blending Guide. One day is provided as a Training of Trainers course for people who are certified as Training and Technical Assistance Professionals (T-TAP) trainers in NYS. This may include CCR&R staff, as well as other certified trainers of the early care and learning community. Training the Trainer opportunities occur in all 7 OCFS regions of NYS. Once the trainings are complete, ECLC ensures that trainers deliver workshops to the early care community.

Core Business

The Core Business Training series launched in the Fall of 2021. In Spring 2021, content specialists from CCR&Rs across the state worked as a team to write six child care business booklets. ECLC conducted 15 sessions of the Core Business Training series across New York State. Heather Sweet, Director of Professional Development at Brightside Up Inc. developed and offered six TOTs to over 30 trainers from CCR&Rs across the state. Those trainers then offered this six-week training series to child care providers of all modalities.

The topics of the six courses in the business training series are: 
1. Business and Financial Structure
2. Ongoing Financial Management
3. Staff Recruitment, Management, and Retention
4. Marketing
5. Facilities and Liability
6. Program Contracts and Policies 

These courses assist providers in gaining confidence, skill, and practical expertise that will help them upgrade their child care business. 

Trauma Informed Practices

ECLC, alongside its partners at the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, began a two-part training series on trauma informed organizations for NYS CCR&R staff. Part one of these trainings, “Turning Compassion Fatigue into Compassion Resilience,” represents a continued statewide effort to integrate trauma-informed practices across the network. Part two of the trainings will be provided by the National Council for Mental Wellbeing, “Building Organizational Resilience.”

It is vital that the CCR&Rs be able to work effectively in a trauma-informed context because CCR&R agencies work with parents of young children and child care providers on a daily basis.  Trauma-informed agency training helps CCR&R staff to:

  • Recognize the prevalence of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) in the populations they serve
  • Understand that many behaviors and symptoms are the result of traumatic experiences
  • Learn how to empower clientele to meet their own needs despite their past traumatic experiences

 

Contact ECLC’s Director of Child Care Supply, Andria Ryberg, for information on how your agency or program can get involved in these training opportunities.

The production of these trainings are supported by the Preschool Development Grant Birth through
Five Initiative (PDGB5), Grant Number 90TP005902, from the U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Child Care.

Assessing Cultural Diversity Efforts with the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI)

Assessing your cultural diversity efforts can sometimes be quite daunting, right? How do we know if we’re making impact with our training efforts? Well, the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI) Assessment is a great tool used to identify where an individual or group’s cultural sensitivity lies.

The IDI is a statistically sound, cross-culturally valid assessment that measures an individual or group’s specific level of cultural competence. As part of the assessment process, individuals are asked to complete a 50-item, online assessment. Although the assessment is completed individually, the results can be disseminated both as a group or individual report.

The IDI provides a structure for understanding how we, as individuals and organizations, see difference. Five stages of mindsets and skillsets describe the levels of effectiveness when we interact across differences both individually and organizationally.

Furthermore, the IDI has been demonstrated (through research) to have high predictive validity to both bottom-line cross-cultural outcomes in organizations and intercultural goal accomplishments in education.

There are a number of reasons for using the IDI assessment tool:

  • The IDI is theory-based. The IDI is the only theory-based assessment of intercultural competence.
  • The IDI is developmental. The IDI is the only developmental assessment of intercultural competence
  • The IDI provides practical, in-depth information. The IDI allows extensive and in-depth insights on individual and group levels of intercultural competence.

As the information is growing, we are beginning to conduct this assessment for those outside the network. IDI is a valuable tool to determine if an individual or organization is ready and offers suggestions as to how to move forward.

Contact Elijah Foulks for more information.