Getting to Know your International Contacts- Part 2

Well, I have not heard from my international contact.  I visited the Harvard University Center on the Developing Child - Global Initiatives.  The three insights that I learned  are the following:

1.  The Global Children's Initiative is focused on three strategic objectives:

1. To reframe public discourse about the early childhood period by educating high-level decision-makers about the common underlying science of learning, behavior and health;
2. To support innovative, multidisciplinary research and demonstration projects in selected countries or regions to expand global understanding of how healthy development happens, how it can be derailed, and how to get it back on track; and 
3. To build leadership capacity in child development research and policy among individuals and institutions in low and middle-income countries in order to increase the number and influence of diverse perspectives that are contributing to the global movement on behalf of young children (http://developingchild.harvard.edu/index.php/activities/global_initiative/).  

2.  The Global Initiative discussed children in crisis and conflict situations.  Presently, the initiative is exploring potential collaborations with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard School of Public Health.  The goals of this collaboration is to develop a science-based, developmental review regarding the assessment and management of a child's well being with regards to a natural and man-made crises, focusing on both immediate circumstances and long-term adaptation.  This collaboration will focus initially on exploring comparable approaches to surveying child status in post-earthquake Haiti and Chile, and bringing the science of child development into strategies for addressing acute malnutrition (http://developingchild.harvard.edu/index.php/activities/global_initiative/).

3.  The second priority, and the one that I would be most interested in learning more, was there goals to generate and apply new knowledge that addresses the health and developmental needs of young children in a variety of settings.  The Global Initiative already has initial projects that are in various stages of planning, fundraising and implementation.  These projects include the following:

• Accessing quality early childhood environments and programs in diverse global contexts,
• Piloting assessments to measure child development outcomes linked to malaria control strategies in Zambia; and
• Expanding effective interventions to improve preschool quality in Chili ( http://developingchild.harvard.edu/index.php/activities/global_initiative/).

Global Initiatives also plans to sponsor research forums to facilitate collaboration among a wide network of scholars globally to share findings and co-develop publications (http://developingchild.harvard.edu/index.php/activities/global_initiative/).  I subscribed to its mailing list, as well as, the schedule of upcoming forums.