Staff Helping Our People with Environmental Sustainability (HOPES) is a Climate Action Newsletter series, where I sit down with my West Central Initiative peers to discuss the high-impact climate action work they do across our region. Over a hot cup of coffee, we talk through how their work impacts the health of our pine-and-prairie home.
Early childhood care and the experience itself in west central Minnesota are already being affected by global warming. “And it’s not just Minnesota,” Nancy Jost, Director of Early Childhood at West Central Initiative, reminded me. “It’s everywhere in this country, and everywhere around the world that children are more vulnerable to different impacts of climate change.”
Jost has been working to improve early childhood for years in west central Minnesota. She collaborates with leading institutions in the field to advocate for state and federal funding that will reinvest in the development and flourishing of America’s children. Jost ensures West Central Initiative co-signs comments and requests for program language to ensure that new dollars from the Inflation Reduction Act flow to need-based and high-impact programs.
“Children should be outside playing but can’t when air quality is unhealthy because of wildfire smoke, wildfires made worse by years of poor forest management and hotter, drier years,” Jost said. “The mental health of young children is also strained when natural disasters, made more frequent and devastating because of global warming, strike and disrupt daily life.”
Those effects are thankfully being acknowledged and acted on by other social entrepreneurs like Chief Executive and Co-founder of Capita, Joe Waters. In a separate interview, Waters agreed with Jost that global warming poses a number of unique threats to young children and their development because of their physiology.
“Think, for example, about the effects of extreme heat like we’re seeing in Texas,” Waters said. “Right now, poor air quality from Canadian wildfire smoke has impacted millions. More extreme storms can create risk for traumatic experiences and displacement. Children all over the world are going to be vulnerable to these climate disruptions.”
To address these issues, Capita partnered with This is Planet Ed, an initiative of the Energy and Environment Program of the Aspen Institute. Together they created the Early Years Climate Action Task Force, with members from across early childhood care and education, pediatrics, climate science and policy, and parents, to draft the U.S. Early Years Climate Action Plan. “The plan will recommend ways the country can help young children, zero to eight, flourish in the face of climate change. It will be published in late 2023,” wrote Nadia Gronkowski, national policy manager at Start Early, in an email to Jost.
Jost always is staying current with the broader conversations around early childhood through newsletters, workshops, webinars, and conversations with other leaders on the issue. “I’m always looking ahead to what topics or issues are really going to affect young children, and climate change just kept coming up,” Jost said. The ongoing work of the Early Years Climate Action Task Force, Jost said, could very well help inform early childhood work, and the anticipated changes to it, in Minnesota.
The national action plan and framework the task force is currently drafting will include specific recommendations for child- and family-serving systems, philanthropy, business, and many others. “The goal of these recommendations is to support the flourishing of young children and their families in the context of climate disruption,” Waters said.
Capita and its partners are eager to work out actions and implementation strategies with community partners after the plan is finalized to find solutions to geographically unique problems. Jost is looking forward to the plan’s release and adds that “At this point in west central Minnesota, we really have to concentrate on building awareness about the intersection of early childhood and climate change. At the same time, there’s the immediate issue of a shortage of child care staff and educators, so we have to balance our work with that reality.”
According to Jost, recommendations for child care providers need to enhance and not add to their work. “Our field needs to show how doing this work on climate change is going to help them do their job with children,” said Jost. “We have to make that direct connection apparent, so that the two don’t seem separate or unrelated — because they aren’t.”
About the Author
Benjamin Velani is the Lead for America Climate Fellow and serving AmeriCorps member at West Central Initiative. He recently graduated Summa Cum Laude from Cornell University, majoring in Religious Studies and Government and writing an undergraduate thesis on the human and ecological effects of light pollution and dark night skies. He was formerly the Dining Editor at The Cornell Daily Sun, and he’s now taking the lead on West Central Initiative’s Climate Action Newsletter.
