Calm, Focused, Collaborative, and Open to Innovation
Head Start BOLD Game Changer: Alina Vega
In early spring, NHSA named 14 individuals as 2020 BOLD Prize winners in recognition of their extraordinary leadership in response to the unique challenges they encountered in 2020… Over the course of this summer, NHSA is sharing insights from each BOLD Prize Winner about leading through unprecedented times and overcoming uncertainty and adversity to support both staff and the children and families Head Start serves.
Leading for the present and the future, valuing all voices, with an eye toward a reimagined education system that works for all children, makes Alina Vega a 2020 BOLD Game Changer.
Alina Vega is Vice President of Child Development, Prevention & Early Education for Vista Del Mar Child & Family Services in Los Angeles, California. In this role, Alina oversees operations for Vista del Mar’s two Early Head Start (EHS) programs, their EHS home-based program, and EHS-Child Care Partnerships. In 2020, Alina supported her staff of 50 and the families they serve through the COVID-19 pandemic, heightened calls for racial justice, fears of deportation, and the effects of ravaging wildfires, all of which had a tremendous impact on their Los Angeles community. Alina recognized that any one of these events would be stressful and traumatic on its own, but with all of these events combined, families were experiencing significant trauma.
There was no way to be fully prepared for what 2020 would bring, but Alina and her team started establishing policies and procedures in the months before the March pandemic shutdown that could support distance services. They created new consent forms for telehealth, invested in virtual platforms for curriculum and screenings, and started to identify what technology had to be updated. They provided children with tablets and some families with hotspots to assure they could stay connected thanks to their advance planning, which enabled them to address these needs before the demand for these devices had skyrocketed and created a shortage.
Alina was the leader her program needed through this time: calm, focused, collaborative, and open to innovation. Alina saw the events of 2020 as an opportunity as well as hardship, an opportunity to look at the big picture and think about how early education could better support families, especially those who have been marginalized. Alina’s forward-thinking ideas and truly collaborative leadership make her a 2020 BOLD Game Changer.
In her own words:
“Vista Del Mar / Home-SAFE is located in Los Angeles, one of the most impacted areas in the country as it relates to COVID-19, civil unrest, fear of deportation, and ravaging fires. The amount of trauma and stress that our community is facing is unprecedented and frankly feels insurmountable at times…We in the Head Start community are pioneers of the moment. We are, as they say in business, ‘building the plane as we fly it.’ I won’t be paralyzed hoping for normal to return. Normal is and will be what we make of it. We have a very important opportunity to re-think education and re-align ourselves to raise children who are ready for the world they will grow up in. To have the courage to reexamine systems that oppress young children of color and rebuild them so that they work for all children. Basing our decisions on data and science and pushing ourselves to think past what we have always done. I hope to learn from the experiences I have had and move ahead with the mental health of children and families in mind. I believe we have a hard road ahead, but choose to focus on the opportunities.”
Learn more about the 2020 BOLD Leadership Prize and explore profiles of the BOLD leaders in your community on our website.
