Photo by Thomas Park on Unsplash

Kim Paolini is the Community and Early Years Program Coordinator at Hope Community Services. We interviewed her about the multiple facets of this role, supporting programming for both urban and rural participants.

Kim is Coalition Coordinator for the CAPC and CPNP programs in her widespread geographical area. The Communities for Children and Families CAPC Coalition has been in existence since the start of CAPC in BC nearly 30 years ago, serving the Abbotsford, Aggasiz, Boston Bar, Chilliwack, and Hope communities. They formed the Chilliwack/Fraser Cascade CPNP (Better Beginnings) Coalition, serving the Agassiz, Boston Bar, Chilliwack and Hope communities, as soon as this opportunity became available.

In addition to her responsibilities for coordinating the two coalitions and supervising the CAPC/CPNP staff, Kim is responsible for managing all the paperwork and reports for the agency’s Early Years’ contracts and the Healthy Families Drop-In (run on behalf of Hope & Area Transition Society with financial support from MCFD). The logistics of the Agency’s Early Years program offerings has been affected/adapted during COVID but would normally include:

·      The Better Beginnings Prenatal Program

·      Healthy Families Drop-In Program

·      Child Care Resource & Referral: The agency operates the Child Care Resource and Referral program, which offers parents assistance in finding childcare in the community, navigating the affordable childcare benefits, and dealing with the challenges of accessing child care in an area that has inadequate provision. The CCRR also offers a place where childcare providers can come for resources, a friendly ear, and help with paperwork. The CCRR actively recruits care providers on an ongoing basis to register as part of the local referral list.

·      Early Years Family Navigator: connecting families to community programs, resources and support, along with referrals to specialized services

·      Family Literacy Outreach

·      An ECD Coordinator position: supporting Early Years professionals and family with young children to raise awareness of community-based services, supports, programs and events for families with children aged 0 to 6

·      Story Time in the Park: a family literacy-based program

·      After the Bell Food Program: providing healthy food packs for vulnerable children and youth throughout the summer

·      Food Explorers for Children: an 8-week cooking program aimed at children 9-11 years who are recipients of the Food Bank or are vulnerable to food insecurity.

Kim is responsible for management of the Literacy Outreach programs for the district literacy plan, including supervision of staff, site visits and attendance/support at events. The program develops, organizes and implements literacy activities and invites the local schools to participate in activities such as the “story walks” in June, where a number of local classes participated.

Kim has a personal commitment to raising awareness of the importance and value of seniors within the community, and she is involved with the work of the Hope Community Response Network, which provides community education around abuse of seniors and adults with developmental issues. Kim maintains regular contact with seniors in the community through her facilitation of the Senior’s Program “Lunch with a Bunch”, which provides a weekly low-cost lunch, with transportation provided for participants, and she volunteers in the annual tax preparation program coordinated by the agency. She also has a supervisory role at the Hope Food Bank, where she coordinates volunteers and is the chief cook, providing weekly takeout meals and delivery for members of the community who are housebound. 

Kim talked about how difficult it is for rural and small-town communities to provide the needed range of social services for their residents. A lot of flexibility is required to combine financing and staffing in order to meet essential needs. For example, they have a Doula/birthing specialist who travels amongst the different sites to provide this service across the coalition.

She also noted the importance of creating and maintaining partnerships with other community groups and organizations to extend the scope and coordination of services for the community.

During the pandemic, they have faced the challenge of using Zoom for meetings, the difficulty of building relationships of trust through this medium, and of bringing new people into the CPNP program when they can’t meet staff and other participants in person. Over the past months of better weather, the CAPC program has been running outdoors, which has helped to engage new people. Since COVID, it hasn’t been possible to do site visits, so they have been reliant on Zoom for keeping in touch. Kim has been very grateful, during this difficult time, for the experienced staff in the coalitions. The pre-existing relationships have been key in keeping things going and maintaining understanding and mutual support.

Kim spoke about the coalition model, which is distinctive to B.C., and especially about the strength it gives in facilitating sharing of ideas, expertise and resources (like the experienced Doula in their coalition). She noted that with the complexity of multiple sites including larger urban, small town, and rural settings, with significant differences in demographic composition (for example, the volume of recent immigrant participants in programs) it can be challenging to describe coalitions like theirs clearly via reporting formats that are designed for single sites.

With the multiple aspects of her job, we asked Kim about key strategies she uses to organize all the multiple strands. For her, the key tools are her mobile phone, a journal with blank pages, and her new Apple watch.

Moving amongst multiple locations, she keeps her schedule in her phone calendar and tells everyone she works with at the different sites to text her if she needs to bring anything with her to their location. She uses a journal with blank pages as a daytimer. She commented that she is strongly visual, so uses colour coding and markers such as coloured drawings (especially of flowers!) as memory cues for items she needs to track. She has just started using an Apple watch. She saved up for a long time to purchase this tool, which allows her to receive texts and calls at times when she can’t use her phone, such as when she is cooking at the Food bank.

We asked Kim about how she maintains work/life balance with such a busy, many-stranded work life. She is grateful for being a person who has naturally high energy levels and a positive outlook. She is disciplined about creating distinction between her work and her home life, using her electronic tools specifically for work and turning them off when she is at home. Her primary form of regular exercise is walking, which helps a lot with stress management, usually doing 5K walks that involve going up and down hills. She wears a step counter when working at the Food Bank and when walking, to keep track of her distances.

Finally, we spoke about the specific challenges of this summer’s forest fires in B.C. Kim said they had to cancel some of their family programs in the local park because of compromised air quality due to smoke, and they moved their Story Walk literacy program in the park to an early start to take advantage of better air quality earlier in the day.

For their programs serving families with young children, the past year and a half has required continual creativity and resilience to adapt programming through ever-changing circumstances and to remain agile and resilient. Kim praised the coordinators, staff and volunteers highly for all the excellent work they have been doing.