Educator and philanthropist Regen Horchow Fearon had a warning for the Dallas business community Tuesday: If children aren’t nourished and stimulated during the first five years of their lives—when 90 percent of human brain growth occurs—there could be dire consequences for business and society down the road.
“These are the taxpayers of tomorrow,” Fearon declared. “It’s more than a moral issue or a bleeding-heart issue. It will impact the workforce.”
During a talk titled “Preparing Our Workforce: Starting at Birth” at a luncheon of the United Way of Metropolitan Dallas Tocqueville Society, Fearon described chairing the Zero to Five Funders Collaborative, a unique, early-childhood education initiative to equip and encourage parents and caregivers to prepare children for school by age 5.
The collaborative, which focuses its efforts on the low-income Bachman Lake neighborhood in northwest Dallas, is funded by dozens of nonprofits and foundations contributing amounts ranging from $10,000 to $200,000 or more. Among its members: the Dallas Foundation, the Rees-Jones Foundation, the Hoblitzelle Foundation, The Real Estate Council, and United Way of Metropolitan Dallas.
For several years the collaborative has funded four agencies, Fearon said, aiming to provide coordinated, integrated services to more than 4,000 parents and over 5,000 at-risk children in the Bachman Lake area. The agencies—AVANCE-Dallas, Catholic Charities, The Concilio, and East Dallas Community Schools—have, in turn, helped attract additional resources to the community, Fearon added.
Recently, for example, Lumin Education purchased land for a Zero to Five community center in the impoverished, mostly Hispanic neighborhood, whose ZIP code has the highest percentage of children ages 0 to 3 in Dallas County.
During an “update” before Fearon’s talk, United Way of Metropolitan Dallas president and CEO Jennifer Sampson reported on the group’s recently unveiled, first-ever digital fundraising campaign, called “Silence the Growl” (of Summer Hunger). The initiative is using social media to raise money to help fill 8,000 food backpacks for children over a two-month period.
The program targets students who qualify for federally funded school meals but still need food during summer weekends. So far, Sampson said, the campaign has filled 2,800 backpacks.
