Breastfeeding Friendly Early Care Award Application - Required Trainings
This fall, we are pursuing the new Breastfeeding Friendly Early Care Award from Child Care Aware of Virginia and the Virginia Health Department. When we complete this, we will be the first center in Reston be recognized!
Part of the process to achieve this designation requires that all staff that work with children 0-36 months participate in training on:
benefits of breastfeeding
Promoting and supporting breastfeeding mothers/babies
Storage and handling of breastmilk
There is a required training course that will cover these 4 topics and will count as 2 hours towards your required 16 hours of training for the 2024-2025 school year. The course costs $5, however we have a code that you can use to pay for it. Please ask Liz or Victoria for that code.
We will work to make time for everyone to complete these trainings during working hours of the next week or you can complete it on your own time. Either way, you will receive 2 training hours of pay for this course. Staff must complete them by Monday, September 16th, 2024.
When you complete these trainings, please submit them through the Training Log.
In addition to training, we will be updating our center to prove that we are an inclusive environment which communicates that breastfeeding is welcome and will be supported. This includes offering both public and private locations where women can breastfeed, have culturally responsive posters that communicate to children and families that we support breastfeeding, and children’s books and toys that normalize breastfeeding.
Our center breastfeeding policy can be found here. Please make sure that you are familiar with it.
Thank you for helping make Common Ground the excellent place it is for all families!
