Carmen Casaro-Hall is an industrial engineer from Lima, Peru but she said she can’t find work until she passes an English proficiency test.
So Casaro-Hall, who lives in Hyattsville with her husband and two young children, is taking English classes four days a week through the Prince George’s Child Resource Center’s family resource center in Langley Park.
“The center is helping me to meet my goals,” Casaro-Hall said. “This is preparing me to take the test.”
The Child Resource Center is the first nonprofit in the county to be named a finalist in the annual Washington Post Award for Excellence in Nonprofit Management. It received the honorable mention and a $2,500 grant this spring, said executive director Marti Worshtil.
The 20-year-old Largo-based center runs three main programs that assist families wanting to learn English, pregnant women and new moms, and child-care providers.
Horton’s Kids, in Washington, D.C., beat three other finalists to win the award for 2011.
The organization’s teamwork and diversity impressed the 22-member selection committee that evaluated the 47 Washington-area applicants, said Taylor Pochekailo, program coordinator for the Center for Nonprofit Advancement, which oversees the award program.
“It’s an amazing thing when you walk into an organization and all different backgrounds, ages, ethnicities and genders are apparent,” Pochekailo said. “You saw it not only in who worked there, but in who they catered to.”
The Child Resource Center, which operates on a $2 million budget, will use the grant to support its programs, Worshtil said.
“Our programs are in such demand, we’re just scrambling to meet the needs in the community,” she said.
The center annually serves about 130 adults at the family support center and about 150 pregnant women and new moms in addition to all licensed home day-cares and day-care centers in the state, Worshtil said.
The center applied for the award by answering in-depth questions about its fiscal and financial policies, its strategic plan, and the diversity of its staffing, and then undergoing a visit from the selection committee. The center applied last year and made it through the first round before being eliminated, Worshtil said.
“You see a program that follows all the policies and procedures,” said Liliana Janssen-Checa, the director of the center’s Healthy Families Prince George’s program. “We’re out in the community, and we do things the right way.”
Healthy Families Prince George’s assigns support workers to meet weekly with at-risk pregnant women who are younger than 25 and will be first-time mothers, Janssen-Checa said. The program, which served more than 160 families last year, educates families about prenatal doctors’ visits, child nutrition, immunizations, and parent-child bonding.
The Langley Park family support center provides people, including many immigrants like Casaro-Hall, the opportunity to learn English, to study for their General Education Diploma, and to put their children in a child development program, Worshtil said.
Its child-care resource center offers continuing education for child-care providers and information for parents interested in finding a provider.
But the Child Resource Center won’t be satisfied with this honor.
“We keep improving,” Worshtil said. “We’re very open to change, and an organization has to be. In this economy, you have to be able to adjust to less income and more demand.”
abrownback@gazette.net
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