WooooHooooooooooo! HHI has been invited to present about our work at the International Step by Step Association’s (ISSA), conference this October in Budapest, Hungary. The ISSA is an innovative network of early childhood education and development professionals and organizations. This year’s conference focus is Active Citizenship: Democratic Practices in Education, and it organized in partnership with the World Forum Foundation.

HHI’s curriculum designers and on-going advisers, Christine Chaille, PhD and Frank Mahler, MS, will be going with Laura Peterson to Budapest to share about all that we learned over the course of creating a curriculum for early childhood development that is empowering to caregivers and culturally adaptable for use around the world. The focus of Christine and Frank’s talk will be on their discovery that social and educational inequities begin in the cradle, far before the child even arrives at school. Children raised in severely impoverished or compromised settings, particularly in institutional care, miss mountains of stimulation – language, touch, reading facial expressions, communication, creating relationships, learning trust and exploring. These are things that most parents take for granted, they are interacting with their babies all the time. Considering that about 80% of brain development happens before the age or 3 years-old – consider how much can be lost? Whatever brain development does or does not happen, the child (then the adult) has this amount to build on for the rest of their lives! Just pause to consider the implications of this!

This is all why HHI is designed to be culturally adaptable, to be used around the world, wherever we can help the local leaders to create a foundation of knowledge and practice that they can apply every day to build their future communities with the best hearts, brains and citizens possible.

And, so we prepare to go to Budapest!