Program areas at Children's Institute
National services and community partnerships:children's Institute has participated in and managed several multi-agency collaborative efforts. The organization is firmly grounded in the philosophy that we can do more for children when we work together than when we work in "silos." Children's Institute embodies this principle by participating in community initiatives (whether paid or unpaid), offering resources and support to organizational partners, and taking on leadership roles to move collective community work forward using shared data and success metrics. Children's Institute is currently engaged in several community initiatives: roc the future, a cradle to career initiative, grow-rochester a universal screening initiative of rochester's 3-year-old children in vision, hearing, cognitive, motor, language, communication, social, emotional, height, weight, (i.e., bmi) and oral health (i.e., dental); rochester area parent program (rapp), a parent engagement initiative, comet a web-based information system that enables the longitudinal collection monitoring and management of multisector (health, education and human services) information and working with communities across nys and the nation in regards to the above efforts.children's Institute is known as a center of excellence for the social and emotional development and well-being of children and offers a diverse number of services, programs, and supports. Children's Institute provides training, systematic assessment, consultation, and evaluation for individuals and organizations. Services include primary project, the rochester early childhood partnership (recap), grow-rochester, and rochester area parent program. To enable the appraisal of progress toward goals and measurement of positive outcomes, tools are provided to facilitate the effective and efficient means to chart, track, study, improve, and implement knowledge, strategies, and practices that serve children. Tools provided are valid, reliable, normed, and can be accessed online through the comet system, a web-based means of capturing, storing, and reporting on new data, and if applicable, integrating with existing data and systems.
Data and science:children's Institute's staff are skilled in a range of state-of-the-art research, evaluation, and training tools and techniques, and brings together academic, educational and human service sectors to pose questions and find answers within a range of topics. They build bridges between research and practice to ensure that child- and youth-serving professionals are using research-informed practices and strategies. Investigating the effectiveness of programs used by schools, government agencies, and not-for-profit organizations enables such organizations to improve their ability to make informed data-driven decisions. Children's Institute uses an integrated set of evaluation services and predictive analytics tools for these purposes.
Whole child connection:the whole child connection (the connection) works toward the transformation of settings where children and youth grow, learn and play, so that all adults intentionally foster the social and emotional skills young people need to be successful. The connection creates sustained collaboration, authentic working relationships, and customized services; provides training, consultation, and supports, grounded in research and informed by data; and engages in action-oriented research and evaluation, informed by practitioners, working across multiple settings that serve children to make positive changes across systems.
Comet and other programs:comet is a data collection and reporting tool embedded in several of our programs' service delivery, enhancing our core competencies and technology infrastructure, as well as supporting system integration. Comet helps us achieve our mission by securely supporting web-based collection and storing of assessment responses and other child-centric data, enabling scaling of our services for existing and new community projects to meet the needs of organizations and families served. Customer service for product sales and shipment of program resource materials and assessment measures are managed by production. Intellectual property is associated with the sales of these products and the ip earned from comet usage of Children's Institute's assessment measures.
Roc the future: roc the future is a collective impact initiative bringing together a coalition of partners working towards a shared vision of academic success for every child. Roc the future is a member of the strivetogether cradle to career network, a national movement impacting the lives of 13.7 million youth and counting.