Getting to Know Your International Contacts—Part 2

Episode 7: TJ Skalski

TJ Skalski is Principal of The Mother Earth’s Children’s Charter School (MECCS), the first Indigenous charter school in Canada. Originally from the Blood Reserve and raised in southern Alberta, she eventually left to complete her education, including a Masters of Education degree.
Surrounded by Mother Nature, MECCS recently moved from Wabamun into the former Saint John’s School of Alberta located 35 minutes southwest of Stony Plain, AB on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River near Genessee. A Program Showcase on MECCS can be found in the January/February 2010 issue of Exchange

I found this podcast very interesting. I did not have any idea there were only thirteen charter schools in Canada. My favorite story TJ told in the podcast was about how her grandmother told her first she was a teacher, and that was her passion. It inspires me to also follow my path and remember how I also love to teach and watch children learn.

Harvard University’s “Global Children’s Initiative”

I found this website to be very relevant. The initiative is based on equity and strives for excellence in the early childhood field. In an explicit effort to build an integrated international approach to child survival, health, and development in the earliest years of life, the Center on the Developing Child has launched the Global Children’s Initiative as the centerpiece of its global child health and development agenda.

The Early Childhood Innovation Partnership (ECIP) is a deeply committed and cohesive four-way collaboration among the Center on the Developing Child, the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and the TruePoint Center for High Performance and High Commitment. As an integral piece of the Center’s multifaceted effort to catalyze innovation in the field of early childhood, the ECIP is primed to drive significant, population-level impact by leveraging an integrated science of early child development to produce significant, lasting change in state early childhood policy. By capitalizing on resources in the Frontiers of Innovation initiative, ECIP engages with innovating states to apply the most advanced knowledge in science, policy, and practice to significantly enhance the collective ability to improve the long-term life prospects of vulnerable, young children and families.

As part of its Global Children’s Initiative, the Center is launching its first major programmatic effort outside the United States. In collaboration with local experts, the Center aims to use the science of child health and development to guide stronger policies and larger investments to benefit young children and their families in Brazil.
The Center is collaborating with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, Fundação Maria Cecilia Souto Vidigal, the Faculty of Medicine at the University of São Paulo, and Insper. This project represents a unique opportunity for the Center to work with Brazilian scholars, policymakers, and civil society leaders to adapt the Center’s programmatic model for the local context in order to catalyze more effective policies and programs that will, ultimately, foster a more prosperous, sustainable, and equitable society.

Among the core goals of the Center on the Developing Child is the creation of a new generation of leaders who view the promotion of healthy child development broadly. The Julius B. Richmond Fellowships help the Center to achieve that goal by bringing students from across the University to the Center to engage in ongoing research within an interdisciplinary community and to strengthen University-wide communications and collaboration in the area of child development.