WK 6 Reflection

Advocating for Children and Families in the Community

Linda Dotson

Walden University

Part I

The issue that is of concern to me is the need for providing High-Quality Child Care for all Children. The problem of poor-quality child care has been eminent in my state and it has been affecting the children, families, and the whole community. The issue has been associated with the death of children at infancy stages since there are no quality child care facilities that help them. Moreover, children that grow in areas prone to poor quality health service will grow up to be less productive members of the community. For instance, when some of the get diseases such as polio that cripples them, they end up being less productive members of the society. Moreover, the issues have also been affecting families and societies since they will need to raise a lot of money to take the children that have been affected by diseases that have crippled them. Moreover, most of the families that live in extreme poverty have been in situations where they are forced to gauge between paying rent, buying food and affording quality healthcare for their children. The poor conditions that they live in are the main reason that has caused most of the families not to be able to afford the quality health care for their kids and hence all the above effects discussed (Shelton, 2015).

Part II

To address the issue providing high-quality child care for all children, appropriate strategies will have to be devised. Each strategy should be well analyzed before implementation. The following are some of the advocacy strategies that can be used to address the issue. One of the advocacy strategies is coalition building. This involves forming alliances with other organizations with similar interests. One of the advantages of using coalitions is to that it reaches a larger number of people as compared to individual organizations. I will liaise with community groups to address the issue by visiting various families in the family. Another strategy that will be used is grassroots organizing. This involves the mobilization of community members at the grassroots level. One of the reason for mobilization is to bring together all stakeholders in the community. The stakeholders include parents, professionals, children and well-wishers. Once the community is brought together, strategizing on ways of providing high-quality child care for children will be easier as all stakeholders will be involved. Moreover, the media can be an advocacy strategy for addressing the issue. I will liaise with media reporters to air the issue on the media (Havnes et al., 2015).

Part III

Coalition Building

This has several impacts on the young children and families in the community. For instance, it will make sure that several organizations come together and hence they contribute a lot and these funds will be used to provide quality child care services. Moreover, when all these organizations come together they will be able to merge their ideas and this will result in more advanced services that will help the children in the community. The goal that will be targeted with this move is to ensure that all the concerned organizations are involved in the matter. This can be achieved by mobilizing all the organizations and helping them understand the need for them to be involved.

Grassroots organizing

This involves mobilizing all the community members as well as other stakeholders. The impact that this has is that it will help all the people in the society know their place in addressing the issue and this will help them work on their different roles to achieve the goals outlined.

Media

I believe the advocacy strategy of using the media will have a significant impact in addressing the issue. One of the impacts is that using the story about the community will reach many people across the globe. This way well-wishers and government institutions will contribute towards solving the problem. Media that can be used include mass media such as Radio and Television and social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter. One of my goals in implementing this strategy is to use at least three media platforms to address the issue.

Reference

Shelton, T. L. (2015). Family-centred care for children with special health care needs. Association for the Care of Children's Health, 3615 Wisconsin Ave., NW, Washington, DC 20016.

Havnes, T., & Mogstad, M. (2015). Is universal child care levelling the playing field? Journal of Public Economics, 127, 100-114.