Early Childhood Development

CPLC ECD is focused on meeting the education and child care needs of families and ensuring the educational success of children by providing supportive care and education and fostering family self-sufficiency. ECD accomplishes these goals by providing developmentally appropriate early childhood education services and family support to ensure the health and well-being of children from prenatal to age five.

In 1996 CPLC was chosen to be the Arizona Migrant and Seasonal Head Start grantee. With a 2 million dollar budget, 301 funded slots, and 4 sites, CPLC began the project with very little knowledge of Head Start and its intricacies. Nearly twelve years later, CPLC has increased its Head Start budget to over $11 million, more than doubled its funded slots to 752, and increased its capacity with five additional sites, and learned an immense amount about early child care and education along the way.

In the year 2000, CPLC secured an Early Head Start grant targeted to serve 52 infants, toddlers, and pregnant and parenting teens in the south central Phoenix area.

In that same year, CPLC participated in the creation of the Kids! Bright and Healthy project, to provide services to uninsured and underinsured pregnant women in the Queen Creek community from pregnancy through the first year of their babies’ lives. In 2003, CPLC ECD became the lead agency and took ownership of the project, which today continues to provide prenatal and early parenting case management and support in the East Valley.

CPLC’s ECD families represent an underserved population with mounting challenges: poverty, housing shortages, unemployment, health concerns, hazardous working conditions, poor nutrition, and a host of cultural and language barriers. Collaborating with community partners who share CPLC's commitments to all families in need, ECD turns the tide, providing an array of early childhood development and education services to support the health, well-being, and future educational success of young children.

ECD has identified a need to expand and create new early care and education programs and will use the internal and external partnerships that CPLC has built to create new programs to serve our constituents. Early care and education is on the forefront of public policy to provide prevention before intervention is necessary. Government entities, non-profits, and the private sector are all trying to identify the best way to provide quality early learning programs for children and families. CPLC ECD is working to find new ways to address the growing needs of children and families in the areas of early care and education and help them build resiliency to facilitate future success.

Early Childhood Development
1046 East Buckeye Road
Phoenix, AZ  85034
602.254.4827
602.307.9752 – fax