At Community Foundation Sonoma County, we are committed to promoting equity in our community. When we learned about the critical role that early childhood education plays in a child’s later success in school, career, and life, and that in Sonoma County only half of our young children have access to early childhood education, we knew we had to do something.
In late 2014 we launched a three-year Early Childhood Education Initiative to increase family engagement with early literacy. We provided several grants to support parents as their child’s first and most important teacher; one of these grants was to United Way of the Wine Country to provide 800 families with Kindergarten Readiness Backpacks filled with bilingual books and developmentally-appropriate activities for young children.
A recent Press Democrat article highlights our partnership with United Way and other agencies to assemble and distribute these backpacks to young children in Roseland. We are grateful to our partners, Sonoma Wine County Weekend, United Way of the Wine Country, and Roseland University Preparatory High School, for their support in helping the next generation enter kindergarten ready to learn and succeed in school.
