Local nonprofit serving new parents in ‘very huge emergency’ after funding gaffe with state

Earlier this month, a group of eight women gathered in a small room behind an unassuming storefront in Skokie and turned their attention to a white board. An instructor was drawing letters from the alphabet to begin the day’s lesson. 

The class was designed to help the women — who immigrated to the United States fluent only in Arabic, Dari, Farsi or Spanish — learn to speak English, and it is only one of a number of free programs offered by the Early Childhood Alliance, a Skokie-based nonprofit.  

The course is poised to be eliminated in the coming year after the nonprofit learned it will not receive $250,000 it anticipated from the Illinois Department of Human Services. Tina Vanderwarker, the ECA’s executive director, said an error in the language of the IDHS’s budget led to the withholding.

The funds constitute 45% of the ECA’s budget, Vanderwarker said, leaving the nonprofit’s board and leadership to pursue measures to ensure the organization can survive until July 2026, when state lawmakers have a chance to correct the shortfall. 

“The entire family engagement team is at stake right now, which impacts the access to the services,” said Astrid Suarez, the ECA’s director of collective impact. 

“This is a one-stop shop, (and it will) be reduced drastically if we don’t fix the funding situation within the next three months. So we are going to begin the decision to cut down our programs January 1,” Suarez said. “We are in a very huge emergency situation right now, huge.”

Early Childhood Alliance fundraiser

Lighting the Way Forward
When: 5-8 p.m. on Jan. 23
Where: Sketchbook Brewing Company, 4901 Main St. 

First formed in 2018, the Early Childhood Alliance helps new parents in need of childcare, rent, food or school registration assistance in Niles Township gain access to those resources by raising awareness of government programs and streamlining the process for parents to become eligible and apply.

Suarez said that the ECA provides a service that no other organization in Niles Township matches, notably because of how crucial early ages (0-5) are in shaping a child’s socioeconomic outcome, and also because of the increased number of families who moved to Skokie from Afghanistan, Ukraine and South America after the pandemic and now struggle with language barriers.

About 90% of the 325 children the ECA served over the last two years came from Skokie, Suarez said. 

Much of the ECA’s operations consist of its family engagement team meeting with parents to enable access to early childhood resources, but it has also facilitated a bimonthly new-parent support group and community movie nights.

On Dec. 16,  Nahrin Tamo, a family liaison who speaks Syrian Arabic, sat in a nearby play room with a child of one of the women enrolled in the English as a Second Language course to help keep the child safe and occupied so her mother could focus on the class. 

Tamo said she’s seen members of the local Syrian and Arabic communities frequent the ECA more and more as word has spread. She said the ECA makes a difference in people’s lives because ESL classes are hard to find and many families come to America knowing zero English. 

“I feel like we’re helping a lot with these families and they really appreciate us and we see a lot of difference in (a) kid’s life and even (a) family’s life,” Tamo said. “The kids come here crying, scared, they want to be out. Then we see them after a month. After a while, they love us.”

Semantics

IDHS provided $250,000 to the ECA last fiscal year, but Vanderwarker said her staff learned in August that the state designated the $250,000 the nonprofit was supposed to receive this year as a “reallocation” instead of the usual “allocation.”

That meant the ECA would only receive those funds from the state this year that were left unused from the $250,000 total it received last year. That sum is zero. 

While the ECA has managed to continue operating as normal for the past six months, the shortfall arrived with especially bad timing. The ECA’s other funding partners already had locked-in their budgets, and ECA staff are still in the process of diversifying the organization’s sources of revenue after gaining 501(c)(3) nonprofit status in 2024, Vanderwarker said. 

The ECA will hold its first Lighting the Way Forward fundraiser from 5-8 p.m. on Jan. 23 at Sketchbook Brewing Company, 4901 Main St., to bolster its finances. 

Irrespective of the outcome of that event and other “creative” solutions in the works, Vanderwarker said all of the ECA’s staff — which includes her, two other full-time employees, a part-time staffer and six family liaisons — will reduce their hours over the next six months. 

She anticipates that the 20 families the ECA’s staff sees a month will be reduced to just one family a week. Both the ESL class and new-parent support group will be cut. 

Eman Shikho said the ECA was the only organization she could find that provides an ESL class when she moved to Skokie to escape the Syrian civil war. With ECA’s limited services, Shikho said she will have to find a new class when she’s made progress in her English skills here. 

She added that the ECA helped enroll her kids in daycare, connected her with utilities support and responded to her questions, even outside normal business hours. 

“When they came here they didn’t go anywhere, they didn’t know nobody, so they were just home. Even her kids were delayed with speaking,” Tamo said, translating for Shikho.

“But she said … ‘You are a lot to me because now my daughter is more social.’ Her kid is more open because we help her a lot,” Tamo relayed. 

Vanderwarker said nobody on staff at the ECA wants to tell a client to wait to receive help. As “everything is so personal” and everyone at the nonprofit is “so closely aligned,” she said it can feel like the decisions to cut services are personal, when really it’s about keeping the organization alive.

But as the ECA seeks alternative revenue, like member contributions, grants, foundation giving and individual donations, Vanderwarker said she believes this pause in services will be temporary and the organization will return to its full strength sometime next year. 

“I think there’s always a chance of that happening,” Vanderwarker said of the ECA dissolving. “But we feel pretty confident that the support that we have in the community is going to help us weather the storm.”

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