Program areas at New Mexico Association for the Education of Young Children
Advocacy:NMAEYC committed to advocating for state and federal policies as well as systems that increase access for diverse families and children to programs and opportunities that support positive child outcomes. We advocated for increased wages for our workforce and stabilization of our childcare industry. Advocacy efforts were accomplished via contact with our policy makers through email and phone. NMAEYC staff and our public policy committee attended state legislative virtual town halls in the spring and early summer, and we attended trainings with Start Early and SCAN. We also participated in social media campaigns, provided mandatory advocacy training to staff and board members and offered our annual Public Policy Roundtable free to the community.
The 2023 fiscal year brought new success and new challenges to NMAEYC. In FY23,NMAEYC had three full-time employees: an Executive Director, a Finance Manager, and a Resource & Development Manager. NMAEYC does have contract hires that do very specialized work such as technology, public relations, evaluation and accreditation consultants. Contract work is very limited, therefore, most of the work is fulfilled by the three full time staff. In FY23, we formed new partnerships, collaborations and coalitions with other ECE groups and organizations. This allowed us to increase our capacity so that we could truly serve all of New Mexico, including those rural communities, Spanish speaking and tribal communities. We provided childhood professionals and families low and no-cost learning opportunities, via conferences, workshops, and webinars. Through this, we were able to offer no-cost memberships. We also increased our advocacy capacity by partnering with other advocates with like missions in early childhood and child well-being.NMAEYC Staff & Board continued our diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging (DEIB) commitment. We acknowledged that a key component to the cultural, programming, and system shifts was ensuring that DEIB was at the heart of everything we work for and towards. We are actively working on our Board by-laws and all NMAEYC policies to ensure we include DEIB commitments and statements in our formal and established policies. Recruitment of board members for election occurred in March and new Board members were elected and brought on board in July. Board members on our Board serve from all regions of the State and from a variety of professional positions within early childhood.Membership:During FY23 we worked with our partners on our professional development workshops to offer no-cost memberships for the participants. The underwriting for the membership fees were generously provided for by our funders. In addition, we offered free entry level memberships with our conference scholarships these were funded for entirely by sponsorships we obtained for the annual conference.Regarding membership growth and retention, NMAEYC was able to retain and recruit more members in FY23 meeting our FY22 goal of increasing membership to 1000. Our growth spurred from the memberships offered with all our workshops as well as with our annual conference. Professional DevelopmentMonthly Workshops:Recognizing that NMAEYC must be reflective of all the communities we serve. This past year, we provided services and support to as much of the state via virtual means. NMAEYCs professional development workshops continued successfully as one of our primary connections with the early childhood community. During this past year, we held 40 professional development workshops across a variety of topics including STEM, Trauma Informed, Social Emotional Learning (SEL), language and health. These workshops served 715 educators and childcare providers throughout New Mexico. All of our workshops have been funded entirely by a variety of funders and therefore, this is the fourth year we offer all of these for free to both members and non-members. Fundraising:NMAEYC sought funding from established and new funders and conducted a number of fundraising events. We continued to seek funding to provide broad offering of programs and activities and critical support services to early childhood and childcare throughout the entire state of New Mexico. This past year, we worked successfully to allow the EC community to attend our programs without facing cost barriers, for both members and non-members, as well as increasing our reach to the Pueblos, Navajo Nation and Spanish speaking communities.The W.K. Kellogg organization and the Walmart Community Foundation continued to provide general operations support to NMAEYC as they have in past years this funding ended at the end of FY23. NMAEYC partners with the Navajo Transitional Energy Company (NTEC) and the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) Foundation for programs targeting tribal, rural, and Hispanic populations in northwestern and north-central New Mexico, respectively. Another new grantor is the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association which provided program funding for support of our work. Other fundraising efforts include social media crowd funding, fundraisers with local business, annual appeal, Giving Tuesday and various sponsorships for our conference. On December 10, 2022, we hosted our very first high level gala fundraising event Snowball.
Annual Conference:NMAEYC hosted the largest early childhood education conference in the state at the Student Union Building at the University of New Mexico on March 31 and April 1, 2023 welcoming 1,070 registrants from across the state.The conference theme was Play. Our preconference consisted of 6 all day workshops including: Explora STEM, Movement in Medicine and Trauma Informed. Our preconference was very successful as we had 600 in attendance. Past years attendance averaged around 100 attendees.The conference planning committee and board did raise registration prices by $10 in each category. We made a $1 profit of $109.00 with our conference. Our main conference was well attended, and we received great feedback. The negative feedback received had to do with difficulty parking at the University and some over-filled sessions where there was standing room only. With generous sponsorships for conference, NMAEYC was able to offer Spanish interpretation and provide 85 scholarships for rural and low-income centers to attend conference. The keynote we selected was incredibly popular and well received Sean Buchanan We offered 70 concurrent sessions.