Thank You For Seeing Us Through 2024

Updated on January 21, 2025
by hhcwebmktgddwyerid

Last year, family homelessness increased dramatically across the country and had a profound impact on our community. CNN recently recognized Horizons as a leader in Massachusetts and a national model for trauma-informed early education. Hear how Jake Tapper covers ‘Homeless in America’ featuring our program.

As we look ahead to the new year, we want to thank our community for your continued support that makes our work possible and reflect on key ways we’ve made an impact for families throughout 2024.

Through our state-of-the-art early education center, we provide access to a stimulating and nurturing early education experience – the kind that every child deserves. Our program produces happy, confident children who are poised for success and able to keep pace with their peers.

• 232 children experiencing homelessness accessed high-quality early education each day.
• 105 preschoolers engaged in STEM curriculum in our state-of-the-art lab where activities include coding lessons to inspire curiosity and bridge opportunity gaps for children living in poverty.
• We implemented a lending library as well as distributed books to families as part of our dynamic early literacy curriculum. We also stocked 500+ new books in 9 languages, adding to our diverse storytelling collection.
• Teachers and children benefitted from weekly on-site mental health services in all 22 of our classrooms, enhancing children’s social-emotional development and assisting educators in their strategies./li>
• Our team served over 114,724 meals and healthy snacks to children in our early education center to account for 80% of their daily nutrition.
• Recognizing the growing number of students with unique needs, we welcomed a full-time inclusion specialist to provide dedicated support to both children and their teachers.

Through our Playspace Program, we build and stock playrooms in family shelters across the state, creating a safe and trauma-informed space for children to play with our dedicated volunteers.

- • Our team opened 23 new Playspaces to meet the growing population of families, for a total of 70 Playspaces throughout Massachusetts.

• Our staff and volunteers provided 64,422 hours of play to children experiencing homelessness, with an average of 2,684 child visits per month.

• Playspace trained and supported a total of 714 volunteers, almost doubling our volunteer network across the state.
• 22 community partners utilized our Playspaces to host playgroups, music classes, and provide early intervention services and programming for families living in shelter.

Through our Family Partnerships Program, we facilitate families building skills and community that empowers them to move from surviving to striving, to ultimately thriving in all aspects of life.

- - • Our Family Coaching Specialists supported Horizons parents to achieve 425 goals in the areas of Family Stability, Well-Being, Education and Training, Employment, and Financial Management.
    - • Our Family Partnerships Program provided over 140 community groups, classes, workshops, and events to parents, including three cycles each of English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) and computer skills courses.
  - - • We leveraged our partnership with Greater Boston Legal Service to provide legal consultation to our immigrant families. We deepened this relationship to actively prepare our families for the challenges they may face in the years to come, educating both staff and families on their legal rights.
    - • We launched a partnership with Second Chance Cars, a non-profit that awards vehicles to low-income people who need reliable transportation to get to work.

Horizons for Homeless Children continues to advocate for children and support public policies around family homelessness and early education. We believe affordable, quality early education is an essential part of a more inclusive community.

• Horizons, alongside the Department of Early Education and Care (EEC), actively advocated for the 6,000 children under six years old housed in hotels and motels across the Commonwealth.
- • Our program lobbied for and acquired state funding to support the opening and operation of 9 additional Playspaces based in hotels (bringing the total number of our hotel-based Playspaces to 18).
  - •Our organization played a critical role in advocating for the continued funding of the Commonwealth Cares for Children (C3) grant for childcare programs – Massachusetts remains one of the few states to continue the COVID-19 era funding that covers the fixed business costs associated with running a childcare center.
  - • We hosted a roundtable discussion and press conference with city officials, advocates, and Horizons parents for emergency childcare funds for families experiencing homelessness.

At Horizons, we continue to invest in our workforce. From contributing to every employee’s 401K retirement account, to empowering employee voices, we understand that building a community and environment where employees feel valued for their talents, appreciated for their contributions and invested in ways that are meaningful to their careers and personal well-being is crucial to our collective culture and success.

• Recognizing the retention of our staff is critical to the long-term health of Horizons and that economic factors are often a barrier to building toward a retirement that educators are deserving of, we improved our employee retirement savings plan, without any requirement for employees to self-contribute.
- • We implemented a job analysis and compensation benchmarking project, underscoring Horizons’ commitment to salary equity for our workforce, particularly reflecting the professionalized responsibilities of staff who work directly with children and families and ensuring that our pay rates are competitive with the market.

These highlights are just a glimpse of the tremendous difference your support has made in the lives of the children and families we serve. Thank you for being part of our community.

We hope to see you in 2025. Save the date for our upcoming events so you can see Horizons’ impact firsthand!