Our Services

AVANCE provides services to low income, primarily Latino families with a focus on enhancing parenting skills, promoting long-term educational success for children, and breaking the family’s trans-generational cycle of poverty.  AVANCE-Austin’s signature service is the Parent-Child Education Program, which is unique in its holistic focus on the entire family. AVANCE works with low‐income Latino families, providing mothers with an intensive parenting program and their children, ages 0-3, with early education.

 The benefits of this program are ample. AVANCE-Austin’s parent-child education concentrates on parenting education, family support, early childhood development, brain development, literacy, and school readiness. Adults also benefit, with parenting instruction, connection and community resources, and English as a second languae (ESL) classes that better prepare them for obtaining their General Educational Development (GED) diploma, taking advanced ESL classes, or attending college.

Who Do We Serve?

 

AVANCE’s most recent data analysis (Dec. 2011) shows that the average AVANCE family lives on an annual family income of $19,443.97 with a family size of 4.36, placing their income levels below 100% of the Federal poverty level.  67.71% of AVANCE’s participants have full or part time employment, and most are working in low-skilled jobs with little or no opportunity for advancement.  As highlighted in the graphs below, demographic data shows that the majority of families served by AVANCE are foreign born (living 5 years in the U.S. on average), have low levels of maternal education, and are limited English speaking.

AVANCE’s program addresses root issues facing many parents; namely, limited English skills, low levels of maternal education, cultural barriers, and a lack of tools to support their child’s learning, leading to a disconnect from the learning process, the school system, and, ultimately, their child’s educational development.  AVANCE’s Parent-Child Education Program builds a solid base for family–school relations, and these relationships promote successful transitions to elementary school and beyond academically

 

Why is AVANCE-Austin Needed?

AVANCE-Austin targets low-income Latino children because children living in poverty, on average, enter kindergarten far behind their middle-class peers. This condition affects them throughout school and life. With 40% of children entering AISD a year and a half behind where they should be combined with education based budget cuts and Austin’s growing young Latino population, the need for AVANCE-Austin’s is now more critical than ever. AVANCE targets low-income Latino children and envisions a future in which these children realize their full potential to become the next teachers, professionals, and business and government leaders.