Holy Family Day Homes of San Francisco

A key indicator of an individual's educational success is a strong foundation built through early childhood education. Access to high quality, pre-k education is limited by barriers including cost, family income, and overall availability. Low-income and homeless families simply cannot afford to send their children to preschool when the average monthly cost often exceeds 50% of a two-parent minimum wage annual salary. As a result, these children are denied the building blocks needed for success as adults, since their parents must choose life's necessities of food and shelter, or a low quality, unsafe or unlicensed childcare center, so they can go to work one or two jobs to make ends meet.

Holy Family Day Home's Embrace-A-Child Program provides 154 children with high quality, early childhood education, and through our child-initiated and teacher-directed curriculum, they build the fine and gross motor skills needed to develop at an age appropriate level.

At the Day Home, we build the self-esteem and confidence of both our children and their families as we work to lift them out of poverty through a comprehensive program that compliments early childhood education with family support services. Stability is extended into the homes of our children by reducing exposure to negative stimuli in home life, which can damage a child's cognitive development. By offering access to case managers that work with families on issues like employment and home placement, as well as crisis counseling and case management, we work to create and maintain stable, healthy lives for our families, preventing damage that toxic stress can cause during early childhood development.

Children from low-income families often recreate a similar economic status of living as adults because they fall behind in school at a young age and lack the skillset needed to overcome early setbacks. Our Embrace-A-Child Program will improve high school graduation rates through our ability to provide children in San Francisco with high quality, early childhood education, increasing access in the wide gap left by the public educational system. Frederick Douglas once said, "It's easier to build strong children than to repair broken men," and our Embrace-A-Child Program is a key to fulfilling this principle.