Home
Focus Areas
About Us
Successful Providence Childhood Language Program Expands to 5 Other Cities
Foundation: Bloomberg Philanthropies
Providence Talks is expanding into five additional U.S. cities. Bloomberg Philanthropies recently announced that Birmingham, Alabama, Detroit, Hartford, Louisville and Virginia Beach are picking up the program.
Providence Talks is an early-childhood program aimed at closing the word gap between affluent and low-income children.
The program provides families with a recording device called a word pedometer that counts the adult words spoken in a child's presence, as well as the number of conversations a child engages in during the day.
Providence launched Providence Talks in 2014 after winning a competitive, $5 million grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. It enrolls children between 2 and 30 months of age and coaches parents on the importance of speaking to their child.
The expansion is in line with a 2018 Brown University study that found the program "constitutes a promising strategy to disrupt the status quo to advance learning for all children" but that some parts of it are more effective than others.
According to Kimberly Fernandez, executive direct of Federal Hill House, a Providence non-profit that oversees Providence Talks, they are tweaking the program to offer more "play groups" for a longer period of time, 10 weeks as opposed to six.
The Brown review also found that by the end of the program, on average, all children made progress. Read the Entire Article
Selected Grant News Headlines
A customized collection of grant news from foundations and the federal government from around the Web.
"If children fear failure, it will hinder their willingness to explore, think outside the box, and stifle creativity. This can also impact their creative confidence, which carries into...more
"If you're outside, you don't really feel comfortable, you don't really get to relax," a student at Minneapolis' North Community High School tells NPR. "And it would feel like I'm talking to an...more
"For so many kids, and especially kids with disabilities, it can be really hard to find success in a school setting," Young Audiences of New Jersey & Eastern Pennsylvania President and CEO Michele...more
For the second year in a row, a team from the University of Porto in Portugal has won an international business case competition, the Wall Street Journal reports. This year, students from the...more
It's not every day that a 7-year-old gets to eat a burger and a fries at the same time, but that's exactly what happened in China this week, Shanghaiist reports. According to the People's Daily...more
It's not every day that a 7-year-old gets to eat a burger and a fries at the same time, but that's exactly what happened in China this week, Shanghaiist reports. According to China's Xinhua News...more
China's National Academy of Artbetter known as the CAAgot its start in 1928 as the country's first national institution of higher art education. Today, it's "known as a cradle of art masters in...more
For two days in March, music fans gathered in Phoenix's Steele Indian School Park for the McDowell Mountain Music Festival, which featured electronic dance music (EDM), R&B, and indie rock. But...more
Foundation: Rockefeller Foundation, Winthrop Rockefeller Foundation
The University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff is honoring five people for their "extensive community involvement, philanthropic endeavors, and exemplary service to the community," per a release. The...more
If you're looking for a way to give back to your community, FirstBank has just the thing for you. The bank's Charitable Foundation is holding its first-ever Better Giving for Greater Impact...more
Social Entrepreneurship
Spotlight
Calgary Social Enterprise Offers High-Tech Services by People with Autism
Meticulon, a project of Autism Calgary Association in partnership with the federal government and the Sinneave Family Foundation, operates as a social enterprise that renders high-tech services provided by people with autism, leveraging their natural abilities at requiring attention to detail, repetition, and sequencing.
