2009 Promising Projects — Enhancing the Lives of Children and Their Families

Literacy education has a specific role in interrupting the generational link between poverty and illiteracy in equipping parents with the skills and confidence needed to read to their children and cultivate a learning environment in their homes. The Literacy Center of West Michigan (Literacy Center) plans to facilitate that process with a dramatic expansion of their Family Literacy pilot project aimed at strengthening the cognitive skills, vocabulary and reading comprehension of low-income parents and their children. The initiative is a part of an ambitious five-year advancement campaign that seeks greater sustainability for the Literacy Center’s key strategic priorities: reaching a greater number of individuals with their traditional tutoring programs, and delivering services to a greater number of children and their parents.

If successful, this project will allow more parents to receive the training necessary to become proficient life-long readers, making it more likely that their children will enter school with the early literacy skills needed for success in school and in life.

Based on successful programs operating in other parts of the country, MomsBloom received funding to help fill a gap in the service continuum currently offered to new parents in west Michigan. With society becoming increasingly mobile, traditional networks of friends and family are more likely than in past generations to be geographically disbursed. This often leaves new parents feeling isolated, exhausted and overwhelmed at critical early stages of their child’s life. Left unmanaged, these stressors can lead to a host of issues that have proved detrimental to a child’s healthy development including increased risk of abuse and neglect, poor bonding, untreated postpartum depression and prolonged marital discord.

Its name notwithstanding, MomsBloom offers services to mothers and fathers related to parenting, lactation, community resources, and mentoring in their homes each week for the first few months of an infant’s life. By offering an array of physical and emotional supports, MomsBloom helps parents cope during a time of major transition while promoting the healthy growth and development of the newborn.