In the May 2023 edition of SRQ Magazine, we interviewed Bronwyn Beightol, Chief Impact Officer for United Way Suncoast, and Phillip Tavill, President & CEO of Children First, as part of our In Conversation feature on Supporting Children and Families. Below is an excerpt published in the magazine in which Beightol and Tavill shares their insights with SRQ readers on their efforts in supporting children and families.

How does your organization touch or connect with the children and what are the spaces or environments in which your influence is the biggest?

Bronwyn Beightol

I'd like to think that we intersect with children and families in most of the ways that children and families live their lives. So from a partnering perspective, we're involved with the nonprofits in our community, bringing alignment, collaboration, and strategic focus in particular areas. If we're talking about early education, in just the past few years, we've started focusing on our Quality Child Care initiative, which is making sure that there are quality childcare opportunities for families that we refer to as ALICE– Asset Limited Income Constrained Employed–basically our community, more than half who are working hard every single day trying to make ends meet, and realizing that the cost of childcare can cost as much as a year's worth of tuition at USF. The Quality Child Care Initiative is making sure that our childcare centers have what they need to provide services for our families. And that can be anywhere from educational materials, to professional development support, to behavioral health support, and to making sure that our centers have the materials that they need to be successful.

One quick story that came to light even more so after this latest hurricane, is that a center can't function, can't operate if it doesn't have the necessary equipment or safety protocols and all of that in place. So we had a center that lost a fence and lost some of their outside toys and they couldn't open up without having that available. You would think if the inside is okay, everything's going to be alright. It's not. So we worked with our Early Learning Coalition, which is another wonderful partnership. This was in DeSoto County, and we made sure that they had what they needed and got that sorted out so that they could get opened up as soon as possible, and serve our communities and families. Because again, families needed to go to work. And our children still needed to be in an early educational environment, for more reasons than just families going to work.

Philip Tavill

We have multiple sites throughout the county from Northport to Newtown. And our connection with children is really year-round. Infant and toddler care, beginning with services to pregnant moms, taking babies into our care at six weeks of age, and working with them in our really beautiful state-of-the-art early childhood education centers until they're four or five and they go off to kindergarten, or as they like to call it the big school. And we have multiple locations because we want to make sure that barriers to service are as limited as possible. So being in neighborhoods where our families live makes it much more convenient for them to be able to have their kids come see us. And then the other thing that really helps is our family strengthening programming, which typically runs in the evenings after the school day. And when families come back, whether it's budgeting classes, how to become a better parent, or nurturing dads, they're really coming back to their second home. They're coming back to where their kids spend their day. So it behooves us to be really well located based on where our families live.

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