EveryChild Invites the Community to Celebrate Child Abuse Prevention Month
MOLINE, Illinois—April is National Child Abuse Prevention Month. This is a month focused on encouraging conversations about childhood well-being and building awareness of the community resources available for ensuring safe, healthy childhoods for all. Throughout the month of April, EveryChild is leading a variety of events, activities, and community trainings to help raise awareness and support of the role we all need to play to keep kids safe.
“Childhood well-being is a community issue. We all have a responsibility to ensure children have positive experiences and that families have the resources they need to thrive,” said Nicole Mann, EveryChild’s Executive Director. “At EveryChild, we take a proactive, strength-based approach to preventing child abuse by strengthening families and providing help before crisis occurs and supporting families through crisis to mitigate the impact of trauma.”
“This April, we again have a calendar filled with different ways for everybody in the community to get involved,” said Heather Lamb, EveryChild’s Community Education Coordinator.
Major events include several Pinwheel Garden Dedication Ceremonies at locations across the Quad Cities and the Celebrate Every Child Fundraising Event on April 25 sponsored in part by SSAB, KWQC-TV6, UnityPoint Health – Trinity, and United HealthCare. Throughout the month, community members are encouraged to join a range of free trainings, resource fairs, and dine-for-a-cause nights, while different family activities centered on wellness, safety, and relationship-building are suggested each week.
For Lamb, Child Abuse Prevention Month and EveryChild’s prevention and education programming offered throughout the year is an opportunity to build and strengthen a shared vocabulary across the community to talk about childhood well-being and preventing child abuse.
“Childhood trauma, the challenges of parenting—these can be difficult things for people to discuss,” said Lamb. “But if we all talk about the same topics with the same vocabulary, and we do it often, parenting challenges and seeking help and support becomes normalized.”
According to Prevent Child Abuse America, children who live in families with access to economic and concrete support are less likely to experience abuse and neglect. And yet, too often our society thinks of raising healthy children as a parent or caregiver’s responsibility alone. This simply isn’t true. Community support and partnerships can help lighten the burden on families and strengthen communities from the ground up.
EveryChild’s community education programming ranges from basic overviews and refreshers to more in-depth, targeted trainings. Like many of EveryChild’s programs, the Community Education team’s focus is to equip parents, professionals, and community members with the tools and knowledge they need to support community efforts to prevent child abuse and neglect and lay the foundation for every child to thrive.
“While we have great evidence-based, licensed curriculums, we also have the ability to adapt our materials to suit the audience we’re talking to,” said Lamb. “For instance, we can facilitate the same Technology Safety training to two very different groups; adapting the information to fit each group’s needs (for example, parents of toddlers vs. parents of teens), and it will benefit families and kids in our community.
“When you know better, you do better,” she added. “Every parent, every community member can benefit from the skills and resources we provide. We need the community’s help in providing every child with the safe, healthy childhood they deserve – and that starts with supporting families.”
Celebrate Every Child Fundraising Event – April 25
The Celebrate Every Child Fundraising Event will be held on Thursday, April 25th at 5:30pm at the Waterfront Convention Center. Tickets for this event are on sale now and include heavy hors d’oeuvres, drinks, entertainment by the Moline High School Chamber Orchestra, and a live and silent auction. Hero Sponsor for this event is SSAB. Champion Sponsors include UnityPoint Health – Trinity, KWQC-TV6, and United HealthCare.
This year, EveryChild is honored to welcome Erin Merryn, a child abuse survivor and internationally recognized author, speaker, and advocate for child abuse prevention, as the guest speaker for their Celebrate Every Child Event. Ms. Merryn is the advocate and namesake of Erin’s Law, a law currently passed in 38 states, including Illinois, that requires personal body safety taught in public schools every year.
For more information on all of EveryChild’s April events, please visit www.foreverychild.org/calendar.
Dates to know:
Tuesday, April 2: Giving Tuesday for Child Abuse Prevention Month
Wednesday, April 3: Muscatine Courthouse Pinwheel Ceremony – 11:00am
Wednesday, April 3: Play for a Cause – Analog Pizza & Games, Moline - 5:30pm - 8:30pm
Thursday, April 4: Rock Island County Justice Center Pinwheel Ceremony – 11:00am
Friday, April 5: Wear Blue Day
Friday, April 5: Davenport Police Department Pinwheel Ceremony - 9:00am
Friday, April 5: Rock Island County Children’s Advocacy Center Pinwheel Garden – 10:15am
Monday, April 8: Dine for a Cause – Bad Boy’z Pizza
Tuesday, April 9: St. Ambrose Children’s Campus Pinwheel Ceremony – 3:00pm
Wednesday, April 10: Rock Island Arsenal Pinwheel Ceremony - 10:00am
Saturday, April 13: Rock Island County AOK Community Resource Fair
Tuesday, April 16: Moline Police Department Pinwheel Ceremony – 11:00am
Thursday, April 25: Celebrate Every Child Gala – 5:30pm