Provider profile: Christina Winslow

Dave SandersQueens provider Christina Winslow plays the educational game Memory with three of the children in her care. Christina Winslow has a cause, she has a concern and she says that she just may have a solution: confront community issues by helping young people reach their potential. That’s also the name of the enterprising Queens provider’s seven-year-old nonprofit, A Cause, A Concern, A Solution, known throughout her South Jamaica neighborhood and beyond for its annual back-to-school and holiday events and Girls’ Empowerment Conference.

Before opening her group family child care program, “Kids Are People, Too,” Winslow worked as a substance abuse counselor with young men at Daytop Village’s outpatient program, an experience she credits with inspiring her to enter family child care.

“‘Why don’t you open up a day care, Ms. Winslow?’” Winslow said the struggling adolescents with whom she worked asked her. “They told me, ‘If we had someone like you when we were younger, things may have turned out differently.’ It touched my heart.”

Driven by a simple desire to give back to her community and help those in need, Winslow said she wasn’t aware at the time of the full impact of her work.

“A lot of people used to tell me I was a mentor,” she said. “I didn’t know that — I was just doing my job.”

It was while at Daytop that Winslow organized her first back-to-school event, featuring free backpacks and school supplies “to start school off properly” and supported by City Council Member Leroy Comrie. “I had seen a lot of people struggling in the community and I wanted to do an event,” she said.

Dave Sanders While it remains a small operation — “It’s God, me and my kids,” Winslow said — A Cause, A Concern, A Solution has in the last several years become widely known in the community, and Winslow expects as many as 700 people to attend the seventh annual back-to-school event, now co-sponsored by Council Member Ruben Wills and State Senator Shirley Huntley as well as Comrie. Her other annual events — a Christmas party with free toys for underprivileged children, most of whom live in the shelter system, and a free empowerment conference for girls ages 12 to 21 — are similarly popular.

But it is working at her child care program, teaching up to 12 infants, toddlers and elementary school students and loving every minute of it, where Winslow spends most of her time. Winslow’s focus is on reading, and she and her assistant use the Baby Read to Me curriculum. During a recent visit, she and a handful of the children in her care played the educational game Memory before settling down to discuss reading reports and U.S. geography. In their reports on the states, the children had dug up obscure facts — Nevada has buffalo ranches and remarkably colorful rainbows — that only a true geography buff would know.

Winslow sees the union as an important ally in the fight for providers’ rights and community justice.

“The union fights for us,” she said. “They know our struggle. It’s beautiful.”

Asked how she feels about her work and the impact it is having, Winslow reflected, “With everything that I give, I think it’s making a difference in the kids’ lives and also in the community.”

You can read more about A Cause, A Concern, A Solution at www.acacas.org.