One of the most important lessons you learn in a conversation with Mo Barbosa is that everything in youth development work is – or should be – connected.

“The better we do with zero to five,” Barbosa says of working with young children, “the better we’re going to do with the next 10 to 15 years of development.”

Barbosa is the senior director of Community Engagement at Health Resources in Action, where his goal as a trainer and facilitator is to professionalize the youth work field. He is the facilitator for convenings of The Early Childhood Agenda, which are hosted by Strategies for Children.

Barbosa’s sweeping focus is on the zero-to-24 age range – “or 24-ish” he says, “as we’re starting to understand the brain, we’re going a little bit later.”

But instead of a well-paved road that leads from birth to early adulthood, children and families in Massachusetts — and the rest of the country — face a fractured system. 

“There has been this historic difference between where you get child care and how much of it is early education and how much of it is just a place to put your kid,” Barbosa says. “And that difference has dictated quality. It has dictated pay. And it has dictated opportunity.”

Barbosa recalls running an early childhood program in St. Louis where children who lived in local housing projects would not go to kindergarten because they could not pass the screening test. Instead, they would enter first grade as six-year-olds with no early childhood classroom experiences.

The solution?

“With one, six-week summer program, we moved all the children who hadn’t passed the screening into kindergarten.”

In other words, that summer program created a bridge across a gap. And there are, Barbosa says, many opportunities to do even more of this work.

“The space between going from just enough to get into school to just enough to thrive in school is so small. If we traveled across that space, we would revolutionize what children are getting from school.”

“We fail so many children by not improving quality. And we don’t need to scold teachers and show them how to teach better. What we need is an entire system that creates opportunity for every child.”

Barbosa praises The Early Childhood Agenda as an important step in building a system. An essential component of this work is building relationships and trust.

“One of the real benefits of the Agenda is that it creates a table where you can have conversations, look at the field, and analyze problems. It’s being able to have a collective impact on how to move forward.”

It’s also, Barbosa adds, an inclusive process that creates the opportunity to learn from “elders” like Boston’s Thrive in Five program as well as including families and family child care providers, academics, advocates, and policy organizations.

“We can collaborate on funding, programs, and testing out prototypes. We can work on city advocacy and legislative advocacy.”

“And having folks at the table means even if we’re moving in a direction that isn’t what everyone would want for themselves, they can see why it’s good for the field.”

Ask Barbosa what success will look like, and he points to shared ideas and shared achievements. 

“If we can get to a place where children have access to quality care and education at three- and four-years-old. If universal pre-K is everywhere and not just, say, in Boston’s public schools, but across all parts of the field, so it’s a field solution.

“Children have the capacity, if we have the will to give them the opportunity to learn and engage. Because every child we miss, we’re going to have to find in elementary school in a Title One program or in eighth grade in the suspension hall or in the juvenile justice space or as adults in the penitentiary because of the school-to-prison pipeline.”

Indeed, as Barbosa says, a better, stronger system that’s based on collaborative action promises to help boost children’s achievement and improve their lives.