Down East Partnership for Children

Very nice place and very helpful

DEPC is a wonderful place with wonderful people and a great opportunity not only for your child to grow, but you as a parent. The environment also allows the parents the opportunity to connect with other parents and receive support and helpful advice from one another. The staff is fantastic also, and you can tell they love what they do!

Please do something about the homeless inhabiting the discovery park, my children cannot utilize what used to be wonderful park due to vagrants. My partner took our children yesterday and there was a giant pile of human feces in the park.

This place is full of information. A great resource for children and great staff who stay involved in the education of our rising scholars.

We had registered to attend the Triple P parenting sessions. Down East Partnership has a policy that if you miss two Triple P sessions you can no longer participate. The policy, of course, is perfectly reasonable and supports their goals for the program. However, nobody ever shared the rules with us. Immediately after breastfeeding my daughter, as I was looking for the nursery for our son to play with his new friends, I was told the children can't stay and we had to leave immediately because we missed the first two sessions. My son collapsed on the floor crying when he realized he couldn't play. Dear, my heart broke for him. I felt so awful for having brought him there. Of course, had I been aware of the rules, I would have respected them and planned to sign up for the next round of sessions instead. I had communicated via phone, text, and email to let the coordinators know when we wouldn't be able to make it. I was responsive and made myself accessible to staff. The fact that nobody took the time to let us know the rules ahead of time was unfortunate. To not explain the rules, and then enforce them is not a helpful (or empathetic) strategy in parenting, and certainly not in customer service. On the other hand, I'm grateful for this experience with Down East Partnership because it helped me reflect on the numerous times I've expected my children to just know the rules and then become frustrated when they don't abide by them. Nobody wants to feel that way -- especially children who are learning how the world works. For the next few weeks, I kept returning to the picture of my son bursting into tears on the floor, and how rejected and hurt I felt as a reminder of how I didn't want to make my children feel -- or anyone. Sometimes the best way to learn something is to have a really great poor example to show you exactly what you don't want to be. In the following weeks, my son insisted he didn't want to return. I, of course, apologized to him for bringing him there and reassured him he didn't have to go anywhere he felt that uncomfortable -- and I couldn't blame him. Besides, as a mother, my purpose in attending was to become a more effective, responsive parent in a supportive community. After that experience, I realized maybe I had learned all I needed to learn from Down East Partnership for Children. That said, there are a lot of great things about Down East Partnership for Children: They always seem to have something going on to serve families in the community, from documentary screenings to healthy families groups, and larger-scale community-wide events. Their workshops tend to be focused on practical, relevant real-world solutions, rather than theoretical philosophies, which is super helpful as a parent. They also seem to partner with many organizations in the area to pool resources and increase accessibility to as many families as possible. They have many wonderful, dedicated people on staff who will do what they can to accommodate the needs of families and parents -- which is always such a gift to the community. Also, Discovery Park across the street is a hidden gem; it has wonderful play equipment in a cozy, inviting atmosphere. The children would always come home with lots of mosquitoes bites though, perhaps because they also have a community garden, another plus.