Case story: Levin Early Years initiative

Each morning for a whole week in December 2008 members of the interview team from the Levin Early Years initiative stood outside supermarkets and on street corners asking local parents and caregivers to fill in a survey.

The response was enthusiastic. As well as gathering useful data on concerns and ideas from those raising children, interviewers asked people whether they'd be willing to provide more detailed input later. The team was almost overwhelmed when 160 people said yes.

Many of the areas of high concern raised by parents are now part of the Levin Early Years work plan for 2009. 

From the outset the project has invited the community and families with young children to help define how things would work.

Deciding on how the project would be run and who would be supported to host the initiative was open to all interested organisations. Barnardos was selected as the proposed host agency after discussion and agreement between the organisations.

A series of community workshops was held to identify and set priorities for supporting and improving access to a range of services by families with children aged nought to six years.

The three main strands of action for Levin Early Years are:

1. Everyday families
2. Connecting with business
3. Supporting champions

Levin Early Years is not about providing a drop-in centre for parents and caregivers, nor is it about offering new services. Instead, the focus is on helping people connect with existing services and facilitating holistic responses from everyone offering support to parents and caregivers of children aged nought to six years.

Working differently starts with every health, education, care, whānau or welfare worker families have contact with says Fiona Dollery, Coordinator of the Community Paediatric team at MidCentral DHB and Chair of the Levin Early Years steering group.

“Families might come in with a health question, but at the same time get hooked into their pre-school education network as well. It's having a broader view of what is going to be positive for young children and the families they're growing in,” Dollery said.

For Margaret Amer, Barnardos New Zealand area manager and responsible for hosting Levin Early Years, the vision is broad.

“What we're really talking about is building a village and drawing people in,” she said. 

To make this happen, Levin Early Years is very actively enrolling support from across the local community. Including from some places you might not normally expect to get involved in a parenting project.

Retail businesses are distributing Early Years information. At pharmacies, department stores, and supermarkets there are not only brochures but staff and management who actively support better information flow to parents. As the first contact many people have when they move to a new town, real estate firms and letting agencies are also part of this strand of activity.

A key information resource produced in March 2009 is a new directory of help available for parents and caregivers. Having produced the booklet in printed form, Levin Early Years convinced Horowhenua District Council to make it available on their website.

Promoting access to parenting education has led to another partnership. Adult Community Education will include a variety of parenting courses within its list of adult and community education offered locally.

“These types of partnerships are really important. We can reach a lot of families by drawing on these networks, as they reach out to people who may not come across Levin Early Years itself,” says Margaret Amer.

Supporting champions in the seven sectors that are formally part of Levin Early Years means the message of linked up support for parents is continually reinforced. This includes regular conversations with the Early Years Coordinator.

At monthly steering group meetings the agenda reinforces linked-up working, and looking at the whole picture for parents and caregivers. This is consciously described as working differently.

There are barriers for people who are already very busy but interested in working differently. 

“This is a change process – there are the normal barriers, and trust issues, and understanding why the change is important. It's all the normal resistances we have, and yet it's not on a personal level, it’s on a community psychology level,” said Alison Borne, FACS regional relationship manager who worked with Levin organisations to set up the initiative.

“A lot of the people in health services are busy at the coalface doing the job. It's hard for them to find time to come to the meeting, and explore and develop new ways of working,” says Fiona Dollery.

Margaret Amer says that funding structures do not always make collaborative work easy. With organisations funded in silos this makes it hard for people to work outside their patch.

Other challenges faced by the initiative included pressure to set up in a very tight frame,  finding staff and knowing that funding for a project was likely to be for just one year.

Levin Early Years will face no shortage of challenges. Survey responses showed that parents wanted more choice of health professionals, something that is difficult to provide in a provincial town with a small number of medical practices. There are not always easy solutions to complex issues..

With its firm footing in the community, in a short space of time the Levin Early Years has made a lot of ground toward achieving its vision “Ko te aka te rea o nga mokopuna – to reach out and support the growth of our children”.

Lessons to share

• Giving parents and caregivers a say in priorities has meant strong support and legitimacy for the initiative
• Thinking about all the different ways any change message can be reinforced is helpful, everything from language to meeting agendas
• An active and dedicated steering group that takes on tasks as well as planning and monitoring progress is a good way of actually getting things done.