Early childhood offers one of the most powerful levers to create a brighter future based on justice, opportunity, and equity. To authentically realize that future, we are working from the inside out to become an anti-racist organization poised to transform the systems and beliefs that perpetuate inequity. We are engaging our staff and community to improve our practices and continue a forward path toward creating a beloved community characterized by trust, dignity, and love.

Clayton kicked off the school year on a high note by providing families with valuable essentials for Back to School, including a free vaccine clinic, yummy and healthy smoothies on their first day, and a fun-filled event highlighting our programs.

Clayton impacts systems change through our research and evaluation services, professional support, and development for teachers and leaders throughout Colorado. One of Clayton’s priorities in our strategic plan is to support the early childhood workforce through our comprehensive, whole child, whole family approach to helping young children. Clayton cultivates the workforce through three main priorities:

1. Developing practitioners and leaders for the field who are steeped in our whole child, whole family approach
2. Designing, incubating, and testing workforce solutions at Clayton and creating a toolkit for other organizations to duplicate
3. Impacting workforce quality through products, services, supports, and policy

In an effort to improve the lives of educators and the children they serve, Clayton created the mindfulness program EMBRACE™ - Effective Mindfulness, Building Responsive and Confident Educators™. This transformative program provides mindfulness tools to help reduce stress and burnout and the means to cope with the daily emotional labor of working in an early childhood classroom.