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Advocacy

No Place to Grow: Rethinking Homelessness Through a Whole-Child, Whole-Family Lens 

Archived Webinar June 11, 2025

Imagine trying to raise your joyful, curious two-year-old in a walk-in closet. There’s no room for toys, no space to play, and every sound echoes too loudly. You’re constantly on edge—not because you’re hiding your child, but because you’re worried that the typical noise of a developing toddler might be too much for the homeowner. The fear of losing even this small, temporary space looms during everyday moments, from enjoying your child’s laughter to dealing with their tantrums. This is what homelessness can look like for families across the country—living in cramped, unstable conditions that threaten not just housing security, but a child’s developmental foundation.

When It’s Too Hot to Play, Sleep, or Learn: Supporting Children and Caregivers in a Warming World

Archived Webinar May 12, 2025

When we think about young children and temperature, we often think about cold conditions and the protections needed to stay warm and safe. But how often do we consider the opposite: extreme heat? As climate change drives temperatures higher, extreme heat is becoming a more frequent and dangerous part of everyday life, especially for young children and caregivers living in under-resourced communities.

Early Childhood Systems Building: Whole Child, Whole Family, Whole System

Video April 3, 2025

Early childhood professionals recognize that the child- and family-serving systems that are not generally considered to be under the umbrella of the early childhood system—like housing, economic development, and transportation—are less often viewed as opportunities for or barriers to child and family well-being. Each of these systems, and how they interact with one another, impacts a child’s outcome. It is up to early childhood systems builders to identify the barriers to positive outcomes that result from an issue with any of the elements within the overall system. This is one of the early childhood systems builders’ greatest challenges, as these barriers are deeply interwoven with our country’s history and ongoing practice of discrimination and disinvestment. This video describes how BUILD views an Early Childhood System that focuses on the whole child, the whole family, and whole systems.

Work It Out Wombats! Family App

Fact Sheet February 27, 2025

Designed for adults and children to use together, the App has everything families need to have fun learning computational thinking (CT).

Bridging the Divide between Child Welfare and Home Visiting Systems to Address the Needs of Pregnant and Parenting Youth in Care

Article February 21, 2025

This article presents findings from an implementation study of a pilot project that connected pregnant and parenting youth in care with home visiting services. It draws primarily on semistructured interviews conducted with the practitioners who delivered those services and the parents who received them. We find that home visiting services can be delivered successfully to pregnant and parenting youth in care and that both practitioners and parents reported that parents benefit from those services. We also find that engaging and delivering services to pregnant and parenting youth in care presents substantial challenges and that home visiting programs sometimes deviated from their standard practices in response. The study has implications for future efforts to provide home visiting services to pregnant and parenting youth in care or to other families involved in the child welfare system.