Ywca of Watsonville

The Ywca preschool program is a subsidized program, licensed by the state of California since 1995. Our program is open for service 225 days per year, with the capacity to serve 96 children, ages 3 to 5 years old. Our program is a participating agency of first 5 quality early learning initiative (qeli) which has the objective to improve the quality of early learning while supporting children and their families thrive. We aim to nurture social and emotional development to enhance school readiness to reduce the achievement gap. Our program is guided by the quality rating and improvement system (qris), a framework to support quality early care and education. It is a systematic approach to assess and improve early education programs for children and families' services and strengthen partnerships with community programs to expand the array of resources for children and families.

The yw-teen program is a prevention and leadership program. Our program structure is based on curricula that focuses on gender, culture, women's reproductive health, and healthy decision making. Most recently, we added to the curriculum components on self-advocacy and mindfulness. The focus is to provide teens and young women with tools and skills to address at risk factors. Young women are exposed to at risk behaviors, social pressures and a range of expectations that are modeled in social media, and further challenged by cultural, educational and communication gaps amongst generations. Yw-teen's program has been able to bridge those gaps. We provide group discussions addressing their concerns and aids to building and modeling positive relationships among participants. The effectiveness of our program is achieved through adapting the activities to serve the maturity, social and cultural diversity among our participants. Our yw-teen program serves middle school age students, and our yw-leaders is a mentoring program for both high school and local college students who meet their community service requirement and serve as role models to younger generations. Our newest addition to the program is the young women choosing action curriculum guided by the Ywca usa theory of change and framed by developmentally and educational therapeutic theories. In this program teens expand their understanding of their physical and emotional responses to enable teens to cultivate and practice their personal wellbeing to build their capacity as leaders. The Ywca community engagement promotes community wellbeing by partnering with various agencies who organize activities for the community. The yw-teen staff distributes lunches for children and youth 18 years old and under. Also, yw-teens organizes recreational activities for families in our neighborhood. In addition, the Ywca main facility is available for meetings, training, and social gatherings. This year 12 different agencies used our facility, serving 595 individuals. Our continued involvement in the community is reflected by the direct participation in various committees and community forums:santa cruz county childcare planning council district 4 representative childhood advisory council state funded programs consortium first 5 impact consortium south county support & triage group watsonville/aptos adult education ucsc gear up