MAY/JUNE 2024 EDITION
IN CONVERSATION: SERVING FAMILIES IN THE REGION INTERVIEW BY WES ROBERTS EDITED BY BARBIE HEIT
In Conversation
PHILIP TAVILL,
PRESIDENT & CEO OF CHILDREN FIRST Philip Tavill has been President & CEO of Children First, Sarasota County’s exclusive Head Start provider, since 1996. Since obtaining a baccalaureate degree in psychology from the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee in 1989, Mr. Tavill has worked in the human services field both in direct service and management capacities. He returned to Sarasota in 1990 and was appointed Executive Director of the Loveland Center in 1991. At Case Western Reserve University, he earned a Master of Nonprofit Organizations from the Weatherhead School of Management and Master of Science in Social Administration from the Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. In 2022, Mr. Tavill received the Mandel School Alumni Association Nonprofit Leadership Award. Most recently, he was recognized with the Sargent Shriver Excellence in Community Service Award by the National Head Start Association. He was first recognized at the state and regional levels for his impact in elevating excellence across the Head Start community.
WHAT POPULATION DOES CHILDREN FIRST SERVE? PHILIP TAVILL: Our primary focus is families living below the federal poverty level with very young children. In our ideal world, we are enrolling an expectant family and we’re working with that family through the time that the child goes to kindergarten. So if we enroll a mom who’s pregnant, through our case managers—we call them family advocates—we are able to help mom with access to high quality prenatal healthcare and nutrition. And once that baby is born, we will begin serving that baby at one of our 10 facilities across the county, at six weeks of age. We then work with that child in an early-care setting, through preschool until they go to kindergarten. At the same time we are working with the families who are economically
vulnerable. We take children and families based on risk factors. For instance, about 15% of the children that we’re serving right now have a diagnosed disability–it could be a physical disability, developmental delay or behavioral and sometimes it could be something like speech and language–but there are all these challenges that our families face, on top of being so economically vulnerable. So we’re doing a ton of work with the family and that’s sort of a hidden part of Children First that we like to let people know about. I WOULD IMAGINE THAT ONE OF THE PREDICTORS OF CHALLENGES FOR KIDS CAN COME FROM BEING IN A SINGLE PARENT HOUSEHOLD. IS THAT ACCURATE? About 70% of the families that we serve are single heads of
household. There are also other categories. We have a few children who are with us from foster families and we also have some children that are being raised by what we call other kin. It might be the grandparents raising the grandchildren or an aunt or an uncle, but these are situations that don’t arise from good circumstances with the biological parents. In addition to that family advocacy or case management work, we have a program called the Families First Institute. And those are evening classes where we’re really working to help bolster and support the family. We offer, in partnership with the Literacy Council, English as a second language because we have a significant number of our families that don’t speak English as their primary language. And because they’re familiar with our facilities because we have their
kids, it’s really nice that we offer those classes at our site. It’s like a second home for them. Same goes for really all of the classes, many of which are now virtual. We offer budgeting classes, because if you can bring some economic stability and reduce the stressors on the family, the likelihood of intactness, so to speak, is enhanced. We offer parenting classes and we have a class called Circle of Security that’s facilitated by our early childhood licensed mental health specialists. We also have a class called Nurturing Dads, and this is a class that we put into place, going all the way back to 1999 because what we saw is so many moms availed themselves of parenting courses and very few men did. And we had the opportunity of working with a local author, Mark Perlman, who wrote this beautiful curriculum for men. The intent was how do
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