How has the child grown up?

Greetings!

Shortly after the November 8th, 1998 General Election, I asked my supervisor at the Marin County Department of Health and Human Services if I could work on Marin County's implmentation of the California Children and Families Initiative. Commonly referred to as Proposition 10, it had passed Marin County with the highest percentage support in the state. For the next two and a half years, I and others around California carried to reality the dreams of the parents, childcare providers, and other citizens who brought the Initiative to the ballot.

By the summer of 2001, local commissions established by the Initiative had hired their own staff, and many of the original county workers returned to other duties. Those commissions and their staff have continued the work on behalf of California's children which was authorized by the voters in the fall of 1998. Since its beginning, the program now known as First Five of California has utilized $7 billion in tobacco taxes to assist children under five years of age to be "in good health, able and ready to learn, and emotionally well-developed".

My recent retirement now affords me the time to do some undertake a project which I have long thought about. What if I were able to get a group of those who were active in the birth of First Five - to host a review of its performance over the past eight years? Having kept the emails which circulated during the first two years of its implementation, my first step will be to locate the many colleagues which I had during that period, and see if they would be interested in particpating.