Mid Coast

Success by 6, one of the original Communities for Children sites, has focused on early prevention efforts to help all children get the best possible start in life. Serving a broad community, including the towns of Brunswick and Harpswell and towns in Sagadahoc and Lincoln Counties, the Success By 6 Leadership Council has targeted three primary areas: (1) increasing parent supports, especially through home visiting services and quality child care, (2) promoting reading to infants and young children, and (3) encouraging the development of more jobs providing a living wage and benefits.

To help increase parent supports, Success By 6 leaders have helped leverage new funds for home visiting services. For instance, the United Way of Mid Coast Maine helped two local programs expand services to all first time parents by prioritizing its Targeted Fund for these home-visiting services. In addition, business leaders involved in Success By 6 have gone to Augusta to testify on legislation to support home visiting services, childcare subsidies, and business supports for childcare. Success By 6 has worked closely with the Start ME Right Coalition to help educate legislators about the importance of early prevention programming and why quality pre-school programs are important to the business community. The result was that the Maine Legislature and the Governor allocated new funds for home visiting and childcare in its Fund for a Healthy Maine.

Success By 6 has also worked with the local Coastal ACCESS to Child Care coalition to survey ten area businesses and their employees about child care needs. They will be working with these businesses to explore public-private partnerships to develop different childcare options.

To promote reading to infants and young children, the Success By 6 Early Literacy Collaborative Task Group launched the Born to Read program in November 1999 in partnership with the Maine Humanities Council. The program has distributed over 1,700 new quality children’s books and information on the importance of reading to parents with newborns at the three area hospitals, through physicians’ offices, and at the family’s local library. In partnership with the United Way of Mid Coast Maine, Success By 6 sponsored and coordinated its annual "Community Read Aloud" on March 2, 2000 and March 2, 2001 (on the anniversary of Dr. Seuss’ birthday). In the first year 200 volunteers read to approximately 4,000 children at 53 children care sites and 15 elementary schools. In the second year, 240 volunteers read to children at child care sites and schools.

To expand the Community Read Aloud concept year round, Success By 6 created the Volunteer Read Network in the fall of 2000 and has already screened, trained and matched 30 volunteers with childcare sites. Each week, a volunteer reader picks up a special Success By 6 book bag at a nearby library and brings the books and suggested activities to the child care center. The volunteer reads to the children for approximately a half hour and then leaves the bag of books, which the volunteer retrieves the following week at the next visit.

To promote early literacy, Success By 6 has also participated in the development of Book Babies: A Baby and Toddler Storytime. In this program, four local libraries started new programs targeted to infants and their parents and caregivers. A New Century Community Grant to Patten Free Library funded this project and the staff at Patten Free Library and Curtis Memorial Library conducted the training and developed the materials. Success By 6 contributed new quality children’s books to launch these new storytimes.

To promote the development of jobs with a living wage and benefits, Success By 6 co-sponsored a business forum with Maine Businesses for Social Responsibility to discuss the definition of a living wage and to explore approaches at current businesses to support employees who have young children.

To assess if children are arriving at school ready to succeed, Success By 6 completed a survey of Kindergarten teachers in the fall of 2000. The Success By 6 Report of the School Readiness Survey revealed that 19% of children, or almost 1 out of 5, arrived at kindergarten in the fall experiencing difficulties in four or more areas of school readiness. School administrators, kindergarten teachers and providers of pre-school services have come together to use this data as the basis for a public awareness effort targeting parents and caregivers of young children.

Contact Mid Coast C4C