In 2014, the Hemera Foundation pledged support to its Bermuda-based directors by establishing a donor fund at the Bermuda Foundation. With its wider interest in promoting human flourishing, Hemera aimed to support programmes in Bermuda ranging from early childhood development to mindfulness and other areas of social impact.

The Hemera Foundation Fund at Bermuda Foundation became increasingly invested in early childhood education. Its Directors championed funding contributions to the BF’s Early Childhood Development Project and Research Fund (ECDPR) to pilot organisational and system-wide capacity-building efforts to the sector by seed-funding ECD projects. With contributions from the Gutteridge Family, the CV Zuill Fund, the Bank of Bermuda Foundation, and private individuals, the ECDPR Fund funded the research and publication of the report “Zero to Three in Bermuda: What Further Role Can Philanthropy and Government Play to Support Early Childhood Development”.

This report revealed that in addition to funding for better and more ECD information and education, the strategy to achieve better outcomes for young children requires:

Flexible funding to reinforce ‘bright spots’ (public, private and nonprofit) with identified strategic needs
The expansion of, affordable and increased access to promising high-quality programmes
Support for the development of the infrastructure (including standards and curricula) to coordinate an effective early childhood system across the islands of Bermuda.

The report became a catalyst for discussion and policy on how to better meet the needs of young children in Bermuda, and to help them thrive.

From 2016 onwards, the Hemera Fund continued to seek opportunities to make impactful social investments, developing a core set of champions working in the early childhood development field to improving outcomes for kids. In 2017, they agreed to fund the establishment of a website.

A resource called the Red Flags Guide was first piloted in 2002, by the Simcoe County Early Intervention Council in Canada. In 2014, Bermuda Government’s Child Development Programme adapted the Red Flags Guide to promote the early identification of children who need additional resources to meet their developmental milestones. But the Bermuda adaptation of the Red Flags guide was only available to childcare providers. With the pool of people caring for children in Bermuda being quite small and overlapping, a public-facing tool that could inform parents, professionals, and the larger community needed to be developed.

It took almost a year of desktop and field research, followed by the review and classification of more than 250 nonprofits and services providers with a connection to early childhood development, and then the adaptation of guidance made available by the York Region of Canada, to introduce this customised Red Flags product to Bermuda.

The Hemera Foundation thanks the Bermuda Foundation for, in partnership with Sargasso Designs, creating the resource, www.redflagsbermuda.org, for parents, caregivers, and community members who have concerns about a child’s wellbeing.

To learn more about early intervention and resources to help kids thrive, go to www.redflagsbermuda.org

Early Childhood Development in Bermuda