Hopestar: Looking ahead. Read more
OUR WORK
At the HopeStar Foundation, we catalyze our work through four strategic approaches and four long-term priorities. See snapshots of our strategies in action below, and see our latest Giving Report for more information.
Strategic Approaches
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Focus on Whole Child Development: We take a comprehensive approach to investing in health, education, and supports for families to ensure young children have the best chances for prosperity and well-being.
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Promote a Strong Statewide Voice: We collaborate with organizations to advocate for whole child development and whole family success through convening, capacity building, and programs where health and education intersect.
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Build Healthy Systems: We establish, support, and help scale sustainable initiatives to create innovative partnerships and build capacity within and between systems to better serve all children and families.
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Keep Equity at the Center: We analyze our work and ideas through an equity lens that requires a continual process of learning, disaggregating data, and questioning historical policies that create barriers for people of color and under-resourced populations.
Long-Term Priorities
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Take a whole child approach to build healthy families from the start: Increasing access to quality maternal health and child development opportunities that build early relational health to meet the social, emotional, mental, and physical needs of children and their families.
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Advance an interconnected, efficient, and trauma-informed culture within and between government, judicial, health, nonprofit, and academic systems: Creating whole systems that embed policies and practices that prevent and address adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) to better support children and families.
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Build intergenerational cycles of prosperity and opportunity: Working with government, private, nonprofit, and political systems to advocate and scale innovations that build economic mobility for all.
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Uphold Jewish values: We instill our Jewish identity in the work we do through education and community building.
Strategies in Action
Planting seeds in our systems: Embedding trauma-informed education into community college courses
Embedding trauma-informed practices and policies in our systems ensure that anyone interacting with children and families understands what adverse experiences look like, how to ensure families’ needs are addressed, and ultimately stop the re-traumatization cycle – while obtaining the tools to care for themselves in the process. One way to do this is for community college administrators and professors to weave trauma-informed approaches and modules into courses for early childhood providers.
The HopeStar Foundation awarded a grant to the Center for Child & Family Health & Stanly College in 2020 to support the development and mapping of trauma-informed content into existing community college course curriculums, as well as implement continued trauma-informed training.