Happy January!

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Hey y’all! Happy January! I’m so excited to tell you about our focus for 2025. The theme for this year is Uniting Our Purpose: Passion Meets Practice. And we chose this theme because we know that we all have this kind of thread, right, that runs through us that connects us – and that thread is the fact that we care for and care about children and their families. But we’ve got to make sure that we’re coming together on the same page. We’ve got to make sure that we’re along the same lines in terms of our thinking about what’s developmentally appropriate for young children, about what’s right in terms of for our practitioners and about how to advocate for ourselves as professionals and about how to advocate for the field in general.

So I’m super excited about this topic. I’m looking forward to what it will bring us this year and the topics of discussion that will come up and things that will bubble up out of that. So I hope that you’ll get involved with that. As we start this new year, January, always for me, for probably most people is full of anticipation and excitement and opportunities for new challenge and I have a new challenge for you. And that is if you are not already involved in your local affiliate, I really challenge you to get involved or get more involved. Serve on the board, volunteer, participate in events, go to meetings, listen to the minutes when they’re read, pay attention to the budget. All of those things are so important to the work that AECA does because those local affiliates really fuel us as an association.

I also really challenge you to think about your work that you do every single day with these children and families and how important it really is. Please do not discount the true impact that you have on these children, on their families, on your colleagues, on everyone that you interact with because the work that you’re doing every single day is so important. I cannot impress upon you enough what a difference you’re making in the lives of so many people.

I look forward to having many more conversations with you throughout 2025. I am so honored to be your AECA president. Please reach out to me if you want to talk, if you have any questions, if there’s ever anything that I can do for you and let me know how I can support you. Take care!

Email me at president@arkansasearlychildhood.org and let’s chat!

Natasha Kile
President of AECA