“We were originally known as the "Plymouth Early Childhood Coordinating Council". Then when we incorporated in 1996 we changed it to "Every Child Coordinating Council" because we weren't just looking at early childhood anymore, which is birth to 8 years of age. We were looking at children in the middle school years, the high school years, and families--how they worked with that transition. So we did "Every Child Coordinating Council" as our incorporation. Now as we look again at our mission, our goals, every year, we said "You know, we're not just working with children--we're working with families." So this should be really known as the "Every Family Coordinating Council". ”

Click here for EFCC History.

One of our biggest goals was to look at what our focus would be. At that time it was parent education: how can we educate parents so that when they transition into the schools it's a better place? How can we educate parents to look at quality childcare, and be part of that effort to provide quality childcare within our communities? How can we also help parents understand development of their children, and how that impacts how they parent and their own parenting styles? I think that was our initial focus; interesting thing, it's stayed our focus as a county coordination council.

As Mary Jo has said, we had that important goal of parent education, and in addition we asked "how can we provide the continuity of services for families? We were particularly interested in making sure that there were not families or individual children who were falling through the cracks. We would try to really focus on not only NOT duplicating services in our community and beyond, but making sure that there were no children left behind.