Keeping the lamp lit: A program profile of a community-based social-emotional training for caregivers and educators

Developing social-emotional training opportunities for caregivers and professionals can promote higher quality care for children and families in the home and in early years services. Community-based efforts that integrate developmental-relational research into practice using a participatory approach are a growing area of interest and focus. The current paper provides a program profile of RAISE (Research and Practice Partnership: Building Awareness and Increasing Social-Emotional Capacity in the Early Years), a social-emotional training model that uses a bottom-up community-based approach to design and implement a developmental-relational training to strengthen caregivers’ and educators’ capacities to support children’s social-emotional development and mental health. We describe our training development approach, which integrates community engagement efforts with developmental-relational and clinical research, including examples of how participatory approaches may inform curricula development. Finally, we highlight several lessons learned from this training model, with the aim of informing future social-emotional development and practice initiatives.