What We Accomplished

Convening the Nebraska Early Childhood Workforce Commission, 2017–20

The Nebraska Early Childhood Workforce Commission convened in January 2017, with the intent of determining how best to strengthen and expand Nebraska’s early childhood workforce. This collaborative group of more than 40 public- and private-sector leaders from across Nebraska met from 2017 to 2020. The commission was co-chaired by Founding Executive Director Samuel J. Meisels and the dean emeritus of the College of Education and Human Sciences at UNL, Marjorie Kostelnik. The Institute provided supports, resources, and coordination for the commission’s quarterly meetings, which were facilitated by a consultant from The Civic Canopy, a Denver-based nonprofit that works to promote collaborative processes that help communities thrive. The Institute also supported the commission’s work through several related efforts, as summarized below.

Promoting Shared Understanding of Quality Early Care and Education

The commission was formed with a goal of ensuring a skilled, informed, and diverse workforce for all children in all early childhood settings. In our work with the commission, the Institute began to emphasize more explicitly that affordability and access for families was only a first step, and that the relationships formed between early childhood educators and the children in their care constitute a crucial role in the delivery of quality early care and education across settings. A key turning point in commission members’ understanding of the importance of ensuring quality early care and education was their participation in the experiential-based Brain Architecture Game.134 The facilitators emphasized the workforce in discussions, and each group included an experienced early childhood professional at the table. The Brain Architecture Game illuminated the issues and connections that had been presented in previous meetings and provided a common understanding and platform for the commission’s subsequent work and deliberations. The experiential exercise of the Brain Architecture Game began to bring home to the participants the cumulative impact of risk factors and adverse childhood experiences on brain development in ways that hearing or reading about these cumulative risks could not fully communicate. Witnessing fellow commission members attest to the authenticity of the Brain Architecture Game scenarios had a profound effect on participants, who realized that the seemingly unrealistic set of challenges described in the scenarios was not simply hypothetical but highly plausible. All participants reported that the Brain Architecture Game changed their outlook on the importance of assuring quality early childhood experiences. Sacrificing quality for affordability was no longer a tenable option.