Author Archives: GEEARS

The Georgia Senate Study Committee on Access to Affordable Child Care has been staffed! The bipartisan septet of legislators chaired by Senator Brian Strickland includes several parents of young children and will spend the rest of 2024 delving into our state’s challenging child care landscape.  But wait a minute, GEEARS, we can hear you thinking. […]

Summer child care can be daunting What’s the most challenging part of being a working parent or caregiver? Many will tell you—child care! Finding high-quality, accessible care, snagging a spot in that program, and paying for it—parents have told GEEARS that such tasks can pervade their parenting and their careers. Sometimes child care even changes […]

The Mayor’s Summer Reading Club—the beloved GEEARS initiative that fosters early literacy with partner-led programming and free, original books—is entering its 12th season!  The central goal of the Mayor’s Summer Reading Club is to create an environment in the City of Atlanta which supports brain development, early literacy, and learning by encouraging family engagement throughout […]

In the wee hours of Friday, March 29th, GEEARS’ Executive Director Mindy Binderman emailed the GEEARS board and staff. The subject line: “We DID it!!!!!”  What did Mindy mean with this jubilant message? That the dogged advocacy of the GEEARS staff, along with that of our partners, resulted in some major 11th-hour wins for Georgia’s […]

By GEEARS It was almost one pm on February 22nd and GEEARS’ seventh annual Strolling Thunder at the Georgia Freight Depot was trickling to its end. The trash bins were full of chocolate milk cartons, spent Bingo cards, and crumpled maps of the Georgia Capitol. The babies and young children who’d come to help their […]

Recently, Stormey Cone, the Family Engagement and Community Outreach Specialist at Georgia Mobile Audiology, got a call from a mother who could not, no matter what she did, get her baby daughter’s hearing aid in.  So, Cone did what she always does. She drove to the home of a family who were simultaneously navigating the […]

By GEEARS In November, GEEARS commissioned a poll of 400 Georgia parents with children ages birth to five. The results were striking. In the last year, according to our pollster, Hart Research Associates, eight in 10 of our respondents reported “having had difficulty affording at least one key necessity for their family, including food (which […]

On Friday, December 1st, the Child Care Advocacy Task Force of the Georgia Infant-Toddler Coalition gathered 35 impassioned early childhood advocates from all over the state. (When you watch seven Savannahians spill out of a single van after a wee-hours departure, you know they’re committed!) In a most-of-the-day meeting, these Coalition members connected, strategized for […]

This year, GEEARS’ Annual Luncheon happens, appropriately enough, on Giving Tuesday, November 28th, at the Whitley Hotel. While the event is a fundraiser for us, we like to think the giving goes both ways! Three Reasons to Buy Your Annual Luncheon Tickets Today This mid-day soiree is famously fun. There’ll be, of course, a delicious […]

By GEEARS Last month, GEEARS: Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students and partner Quality Care for Children co-hosted over 50 early childhood professionals—almost all of them teachers—for a Human-Centered Design Workshop.  GEEARS invited early childhood educators from across Georgia to the workshop, asking participants to give up an entire, precious Saturday. For some, it […]

At a six p.m. soiree on September 5th,  Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens spoke to about 50 local leaders sipping post-work cocktails and feeling festive.  “As you know,” Mayor Dickens said to the group, “I issued an historic challenge to Atlantans last year. I urged our private foundations, business leaders, and philanthropists—in other words, you—to make […]

August is back to school month for us Georgians. It’s also National Immunization Awareness Month. Most pediatricians would tell you that this is an optimal pairing; that parents should plan for their kids’ vaccinations as intentionally as they stock up on shiny new sneakers and fresh crayon boxes.  “In order for children to be ready […]

By GEEARS Since our inception more than a decade ago, GEEARS: Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students has been known in the state as a trusted resource for early childhood data. We’re proud of our in-depth community-focused tools like the Readiness Radar, but we’ve also wanted to provide a more high-level snapshot of how […]

By GEEARS When a parent of a young child, aged birth through three, enters the legal system with challenges such as substance use or allegations of neglect or abuse, courts have often removed the child from the home, either for foster care or adoption. While this is a tragedy for the parent, there’s growing recognition […]

The Mayor’s Summer Reading Club (MSRC), an annual program created and coordinated by GEEARS: Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students, has launched its 11th season!  On Thursday, June 1st, a host of bookish fans gathered on the lawn in front of the Woodruff Arts Center to celebrate. The crowd included at least 100 children […]

By Rear Admiral Casey W. Coane, U.S Navy (Ret.) In 1942, the United States was confronted with a shocking statistic—out of the first two-million young men who were examined for military duty by the Selective Service board, roughly 900,000, were turned away. This alerted many to the unfortunate possibility that nearly 45 percent of young […]

By GEEARS Georgia’s legislative session is a frenetic, blood-pressure-raising marathon every year and at GEEARS, we’ve got to admit, we kind of love the sprint of it.  There’s a special kind of bond we early childhood advocates share during our 40 days (and some nights!) under the Gold Dome. We compare our throbbing feet and […]

By GEEARS We know a lot of data wonks who sit down to a pile of numbers, graphs, charts, and maps, as giddy as a foodie embarking upon a six-course meal.  As for the rest of us, who can think of many things more fun than digging into all that fact- and number-crunching, there is […]

By GEEARS On Tuesday, February 7th, Grey Kovacs marched down a hallway of the Coverdell Legislative Office Building at the Georgia Capitol. She had a long journey past quiet, glass-fronted offices to reach the workplace of her representative, Stacey Evans of House District 57, where she would deliver a letter advocating for paid family leave.  […]

By GEEARS: Georgia Early Education Alliance for Ready Students One Saturday morning in November, GEEARS’ Pre-K Recruitment Specialist Dawan Barfield stood before a meeting room at the Dean Rusk YMCA Head Start Academy. With his characteristic warmth and ease, he welcomed tables full of volunteers, who smiled back at him over boxed breakfasts.  “Let’s start […]