We’re Still Here: Thank You, Livingston County

A year ago, we entered a new fiscal year without the state funding that had supported Great Start Collaborative work in Livingston County for nearly two decades.

We didn’t know exactly what the year ahead would look like.

What we did know was that Livingston County families still needed support. Young children were still growing and developing every day. Community partners still wanted to work together. And there was important early childhood work that we weren’t ready to walk away from.

So we got to work.

We Decided to Keep Building

This wasn’t a year of waiting to see what would happen.

Our team spent the year trying new things, making new connections, strengthening partnerships, finding new funding opportunities, and looking for better ways to reach families with young children throughout Livingston County.

Robin Schutz, Great Start Livingston Coordinator, worked tirelessly to build relationships, pursue grants, find new funding sources, and keep the work moving forward during a year filled with uncertainty.

At the same time, our team focused on growing Help Me Grow Livingston and demonstrating what a more connected early childhood system could look like in our community.

We reached new families. We strengthened relationships with community organizations. We encouraged parents and caregivers to complete Ages & Stages developmental screenings. And we worked to make it easier for families to ask a question, find a resource, or connect with someone who could help.

We showed up. And you showed up with us.

New Connections Created New Possibilities

When one funding stream disappeared, we had to think differently about what was possible and lean even more deeply into relationships and collaboration.

Sometimes, one connection opened the door to another.

Carrie Newstead and the team at Livingston County United Way became incredible partners and champions of our work.

Carrie helped us secure a General Motors S.T.E.A.M. grant through Livingston County United Way, giving us an opportunity to pivot and create new hands-on science, technology, engineering, art, and math experiences for young children and families.

She also helped connect us with Women United, introducing our work to another network of people committed to strengthening Livingston County families and our community.

Other community partnerships allowed us to begin bringing back opportunities for parents and caregivers that had been difficult to sustain during the funding gap.

Through support from the Region 9 Perinatal Quality Collaborative, we were able to host our first-ever Parent Café specifically for families raising babies ages 0–12 months.

It was also the first parent event in nearly a year where we were once again able to provide dinner and child care.

Families were able to sit together, share a meal, connect with other parents, and talk about the joys and challenges of raising a baby.

That is the kind of connection we were fighting to preserve.

Livingston County United Way Helped Us Bridge the Gap

Livingston County United Way’s support went far beyond making introductions.

Carrie and the entire United Way team understood what was really at risk when our traditional funding disappeared.

Losing funding doesn’t simply mean losing an event, activity, or program.

It can mean losing infrastructure, relationships, institutional knowledge, community connections, and years of local early childhood expertise that are incredibly difficult to rebuild once they’re gone.

Livingston County United Way helped us find ways to bridge that gap and preserve the infrastructure that allows this work to happen.

Then, when United Way brought back its Power of the Purse fundraiser for the first time in years, Great Start Livingston was selected as the beneficiary.

Instead of dismantling an existing system and someday having to rebuild it, we were able to keep connecting, convening, learning, and serving families.

Preserving that local capacity has been a tremendous win for Livingston County.

You Opened Doors

So many of the connections we made this year happened because someone said:

One introduction led to another.

Countless community partners showed up and made it clear that they valued having a connected early childhood system in Livingston County.

Organizations made introductions and referrals. Partners invited us into new spaces and conversations. Families shared Help Me Grow with other families. Healthcare providers, libraries, schools, nonprofits, early childhood programs, local organizations, businesses, and community leaders continued finding ways to work together.

Our local school districts also played an important role in strengthening the system around families. Over the past year, we deepened relationships with district staff, special education teams, and Early On, helping strengthen the connections between early childhood services and the school system.

Those partnerships help families experience fewer handoffs and fewer disconnected systems. When early childhood, developmental supports, special education, and schools know one another and work together, families are more likely to get connected to the right support at the right time.

Every one of those actions helped us build something stronger.

You Trusted Us With Your Families

That may be what means the most.

When a parent asks a question about their child’s development, completes a developmental screening, or tells us their family needs help finding something, they’re trusting us with something important.

When a community partner sends a family our way, they’re trusting us too.

We don’t take that lightly.

Together, we began demonstrating what a connected early childhood system can look like in Livingston County.

You Used Your Voice

This year, families and community members didn’t just support the work, they spoke up for it.

So many Livingston County families wrote letters and contacted their state lawmakers to share why local early childhood coordination and investment mattered to them.

We are deeply grateful to every person who took the time to tell their story and explain why this work matters.

Throughout this process, we have also continued building positive relationships with our local elected leaders. We appreciate their willingness to listen, learn about the work happening here, and hear directly about the experiences and needs of Livingston County families.

We look forward to continuing those relationships and building on the momentum we’ve created together.

This Is Community Infrastructure

Great Start Livingston isn’t one program, one event, or one service.

We are the structure that brings Livingston County’s early childhood system together.

We convene the people and organizations working with young children and families. We build relationships across sectors. We identify gaps and opportunities. We bring family voice to the table. We connect partners who may be working toward the same goals from different places.

And through Help Me Grow Livingston, we’re working to make that entire system easier for families to access and navigate.

Early childhood touches nearly every part of our community: healthcare, child care, education, mental health, libraries, basic needs, housing, economic stability, literacy, recreation, family support, business, and more.

Great Start Livingston helps create the connections between those pieces.

Sometimes that means convening partners around a community challenge.

Sometimes it means noticing a gap and bringing the right people together to solve it.

Sometimes it means helping organizations understand what other resources already exist.

And sometimes it simply means making sure a parent doesn’t have to call five different places before finding the right one.

What Won’t Change

We may not know exactly what the future holds or what the next version of this work will look like.

But we know what will remain at the center of it:

Families.

We will continue to elevate family voice. We don’t mean simply asking families for feedback, but making sure their experiences help shape the systems intended to serve them.

We will keep asking whether the early childhood system actually works for the people who live, work, and raise their families here.

A successful early childhood system isn’t measured by how well organizations understand it. It’s measured by how well it works for families.

Whatever comes next, that will continue to guide us.

Our role is to listen, convene, connect, and build alongside families and community partners—creating a system that responds to the real experiences and needs of Livingston County families.

The Bigger Goal

Ultimately, this work isn’t about Great Start Livingston.

It’s about Livingston County.

It’s about building a community where families want to put down roots, where children have opportunities to thrive from the very beginning, and where parents know they don’t have to figure everything out alone.

Strong families contribute to strong schools, a strong workforce, healthy communities, and a strong local economy.

That’s why early childhood belongs in conversations far beyond early childhood.

That’s what we’ve been working to protect this year.

And that’s what we’re excited to keep building together.

Before We Turn the Page

September closes an incredibly challenging chapter for Great Start Livingston.

It is the final month of a fiscal year in which we had to rethink how we sustained this work, build new partnerships, find new resources, and demonstrate what was possible even without the funding structure we had relied on before.

October will bring a new fiscal year and a new chapter.

There is good news ahead. We still have plenty to learn about what comes next, and we’ll share more as those details become clearer.

But September belongs to the people who got us here.

To the families who trusted us.

To the partners who showed up.

To the funders who invested when the future was uncertain.

To the community members who advocated.

To the lawmakers who listened.

To every person who made an introduction, shared a resource, completed an ASQ, referred a family, attended a meeting, joined us at an event, shared an idea, or simply reached out and asked, “How can we help?”

Thank you.

You helped preserve something important for Livingston County.

And now we get to keep building it.