Place Matters: Four Strategies to Connect Place, Racism, and Early Childhood Development

This toolkit, developed in collaboration with the FrameWorks Institute, offers messaging guidance and real-world examples to help advocates and communicators discuss the connections between place, racism, and early childhood development in their own contexts.

Whether when writing op-eds, developing policy briefs, speaking with media, or creating community engagement materials, this toolkit can serve as a resource to help align public understanding with the current state of developmental science, shift harmful narratives, and mobilize support for systems and policies that ensure children and their caregivers have what they need to thrive.

You can find the toolkit on the FrameWorks’ website. 

Background  

It is widely acknowledged that responsive interactions with caregivers provide critical support for the development of healthy brain architecture and a buffer against toxic stress and adversity. However, the impact of our broader environments on children’s development—and the many ways that racism shapes unequal conditions across those environments—must also be taken into account to design better policies and programs that help all children thrive. 

To support advocates and communicators in this work, we partnered with FrameWorks to create a set of resources, including this strategic brief, that build understanding of the interconnected relationship between place, racism, and early childhood development. 

The toolkit, Place Matters: Four Strategies to Connect Place with Early Childhood Development, offers messaging guidance and real-world examples to help advocates and communicators put these strategies into practice in their own contexts. 

The toolkit is paired with a strategic brief, Place Matters: Communicating the Relationship Between Place, Racism, and Early Childhood Development, which offers research-based messaging strategies and provides a set of recommendations for communicators.