Welcome Champions’ Two New Touchpoints Leaders

Mickia Freeman and Creshanda Riley

At Champions for Children, we take pride in educating our staff and our community about ways to keep children safe. We offer professional development trainings to those who work in social services to sharpen their skills and learn new ways to support and protect children in our community. We are excited to announce our two new Brazelton Touchpoint Leaders, Creshanda Riley and Mickia Freeman!

The Brazelton Touchpoints training is an evidence-based approach to building strong family-child relationships from before birth through age 5. Providers who implement Touchpoints in their practice partner with families to lay the vital foundation for children’s early learning and healthy development.

“Facilitating the Touchpoints approach feels like I’m adding to every provider that attends. They come to the training with their own set of skills and knowledge.  I’m asking them to incorporate those skills very intentionally around child development to establish a relationship to support the families they work with. My hope is that some of the pressure to fix and have all the answers will be decreased and they can focus on the strengths they see to empower parents and caregivers,” said Mickia Freeman.

At Champions for Children, we are proud that every one of our program staff receives training in the TouchPoints philosophy. Since the inception of this initiative, this training program has been led by our Director of Parenting Services Sinziana Bularca, who has trained hundreds of Champions staff and other community providers. While Sinziana continues to lead and oversee growth in key Champions programs, we are excited to announce that two veteran Champions team members will take over leadership of our TouchPoints trainings. 

Creshanda Riley and Mickia Freeman have been Touchpoint Facilitators for 6 years. In their transition to leaders, they will ensure the team meets their goals to empower more providers across Hillsborough County. Two of their main goals are to make a big impact on the community and grow their team of facilitators to reach more people. Outside of being the leadership behind the Touchpoint trainings, Mickia is the Case Manager Supervisor in our Positive Parenting and Partnership Program. Creshanda Riley is the Parent Educator Quality Assurance Specialist for our Parents as Teachers Program. You can learn more about Creshanda in our Behind the Desk series here!

“What I love about facilitating the Touchpoints training, is empowering providers with a different perspective of how to be in the moment with the family and come alongside of them for the family’s success.  When a provider learns to focus their support from a positive perspective in any situation, this allows for a change/growth within the family system and helps to build rapport within that provider/parent relationship,” said Creshanda Riley.

The Brazelton Touchpoints training is great for social service providers who work directly with children and families. If you are interested in learning more about our trainings and signing up, visit https://cfctb.org/community-initiatives/professional-development/.