Early Head Start & Community Engagement in Research

The Head Start program has helped over 36 million children since 1965. It began as an 8-week project then became a year round service to help parents and young children. Head Start services are available in all 50 states, the District of Columbia Puerto Rico and the U.S. territories, including American Indian, Alaskan Native and Migrant/Seasonal communities.

In January 8, 1964, president Lydon B. Johnson, former teacher, believed strongly in the idea that by improving the education system the cycle of poverty would end.

It was apparent to him that early education intervention programs could significantly affect cognitive and socioemotional development of low income children. 

Robert Sargent Shriver Jr. assembled a panel of experts to help develop a program to help communities properly meet the needs of disadvantaged preschool children.

Head Start launched on May 18th of 1965, immediately serving 560,000 children and families across the United States through an 8 week summer program at the Head Start Child Development Centers.

- Office of Head Start, An Office of the Administration for Children & Families

With it's great successes, by year 1967 Head start began to serve families with children from newborn to age 3.

In less than five years, Head Start branched out, creating a program that:

• ensured farm worker families and their children could use the same resources as other low income families through head start.
• catered to help children with disabilities, mandating that at least 10% of Head starts capacity consisted of handicapped children.

In 1983, Head start programs began to collaborate with nutritionists and published a handbook for local Head Start Nutrition specialists.

The Head Start nutrition program has four major mandates:

• to provide nutritious food appropriate for children in order to help meet their nutritional requirements
• to provide a physical and emotional environment conducive for children to develop positive food attitudes and eating habits
• help the parents and the staff understand the role of nutrition in the child’s physical, mental and social development
• increase their ability to meet the child’s nutritional needs.

The Multicultural Principles for Head Start Programs was created to challenge programs to focus efforts on individualizing services so that every child and family feels respected and valued, and is able to grow in accepting and appreciating differences.

In 2020, The Center for Health Disparities Research at University of California, Riverside, partnered with Early Head Start to better understand the relation of feeding styles and practices in low-income families. By partnering with the Grow Well/Crecer Bien team, they will work together to study the role of multiple caregivers in infant feeding and how in turn that affects infant growth and obesity. Ultimately, the goal is to translate this understanding to intervention components that promote healthy feeding for communities in the Inland Empire.

For more information on our partnership with Early Head Start please explore the following website https://healthdisparities.ucr.edu/grow-well

For more information on California Head Start & Early Head Start please explore the website below.

To learn more about the significance of our partnership with Early Head Start, please read part two of the series. Here you will find more information about the Grow Well/Crecer Bien principal investigators and co-investigator, our short term and long term goals, and how we work with low-income families in the San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, and Imperial county to  address early childhood obesity .