Early Learning Neighborhood Collaborative-Kalamazoo

ELNC stands by 4 core values that support our mission to provide our community with educational resources that will increase early childhood education access to our youngest scholars. ✏🧠📚

Those values are:

Outcomes: Driven, results-oriented - We must ensure our children develop and are educated, not by our good works, but by evidence of their increasing knowledge, skills, and abilities.

Cultural Competence: Children develop and grow best in ways that are consistent with the cultural rhythms and patterns of their families.

Creativity and Innovation: Current efforts leave far too many children in under-resourced neighborhoods lagging behind in development and education. We must find and use new and different objectives, strategies, and activities to help our children thrive.

Place-Based: We are committed to the belief that the best environment for the early education of children is rooted in what is local-the unique history, environment, culture, economy, literature, and art of a particular place--that is, in a child's own “place”; or immediate schoolyard, neighborhood, town or community.