Programs for 
Children & Families

Nest Programs

What is a Nest?

Nests, our early childhood programs, are safe and engaging classrooms where young children and their families can learn and heal through play. For children who have been separated from their home or who experience daily hardship, the opportunity to be autonomous, make decisions, and play freely within a safe and supportive social environment is a significant, restorative experience.

Nests are created through close collaborations with local partners, ensuring that each program is responsive to the unique needs and strengths of its community.

Our Role

Space design and renovation
Staff recruitment
Initial and ongoing pedagogical training and mentorship
Operational support
Ongoing funding through our institutional partners

Nests are community-based and child-centered. Each Nest is designed to encourage children to think critically, explore creatively, and work collaboratively.

Creative expression through arts education

The arts are a vital part of our programs. Arts education provides a platform for self-expression, enabling students from diverse backgrounds and circumstances to explore and communicate their thoughts and emotions. Our teachers invite students to collage, paint, draw, and work with clay. These explorations promote fine motor skills and cognitive development, while also fostering imaginative problem-solving and an appreciation for different cultures and perspectives.

Healing-centered care from highly trained teachers

Nests are staffed by teams of local asylum seekers and teachers, all of whom are trained in healing-centered practice and pedagogy. Nest staff join children in play, helping them grow emotionally, socially, and intellectually. Nurturing teachers are cooperatively involved in developing and implementing an integrated, hands-on, inquiry-based curriculum.

Foundational literacy and early math

The Nest offers age-appropriate reading and early math content so children don’t fall behind in their education. Highly skilled teachers meet each student exactly where they are academically, helping them gain confidence and prepare for a primary school curriculum.

Supportive programming for the entire family

Understanding that parent engagement is a key determinant of healthy child development, Nests also offer support services to parents and caregivers. Staffed by early childhood teachers and parent educators, these parenting programs and parent & me programs strengthen family connections and help parents develop strategies to manage daily stressors.

Through beauty, intentionality, and a healing-centered approach, Nests provide spaces where families can move out of survival mode to experience joy, play, and thrive.

Current Nest Locations

Families are thriving at Nest Global’s early childhood and parent education programs around the world.

Nest Tijuana

A school for migrant children sheltering at the US-Mexico border

Mobile Nest Tijuana

A mobile program for migrant families hosted in a retrofitted school bus

Nest Norte

An education space for children at the US-Mexico border

Nest Congo

A preschool program for children experiencing poverty and food insecurity

Nest Zimbabwe

A preschool program for children experiencing poverty and food insecurity

Crianza con Amor Parenting Program

Nest Global is honored to partner with Stanford pediatrician and global health researcher Dr. Xinshu She in developing Crianza con Amor (Parenting with Love), the first evidence-based community participatory parenting curriculum co-created with Latin American migrant families to address their mental health needs.

About the Program

Crianza con Amor’s innovative curriculum prioritizes parenting needs in the refugee context and unfolds over an eight-session series that addresses topics prioritized by refugee caregivers such as empathetic communication, trauma-informed stress management and childhood development in low-resource settings.

Preliminary qualitative data indicates that workshop participants have expressed enjoyment and gratitude, applied parenting and emotional regulation tools learned, changed their interactions with children and felt belonging to the community. Quantitative results showed a significant decrease in anxiety and depression symptoms and improved parent-child interactions after the first round of intervention using a randomized controlled design (84 participants, ½ in intervention and ½ in control groups).

These preliminary results have been presented at the National American Academy of Pediatrics conference in 2024 and the Stanford Maternal Child Health Research Institute Symposium. The final results will be submitted to the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health conference and the Consortium of Universities for Global Health international conference in Atlanta, GA in 2025. A Crianza con Amor curriculum manual is currently being developed by Dr. She and the Nest Global team and will be published for widespread use.

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Legacy Programs

Situations change. So do our programs. We maximize impact by creating flexible programs that respond to immediate on-the-ground needs.

Nest Los Angeles

From September 2023-October 2024, Nest Global operated Nest Los Angeles — a transformative one-year pilot program serving recently arrived migrant families in Los Angeles who lacked access to traditional early childhood education. The program provided over 150 children with free, high-quality early learning experiences, served thousands of meals, and offered hundreds of hours of community programming. Nest Los Angeles demonstrated the vital need for and effectiveness of culturally responsive early childhood programming for migrant communities in the United States.

Nest Greece

From 2018-2023, Nest Global operated a series of Nest programs for the thousands of refugee families fleeing Syria, Afghanistan, and other areas of the Middle East affected by war. As Greek authorities moved refugees from the Aegean islands to the mainland capital of Athens, the Nest moved along with it, providing critical education to over 5,700 young children  and families.

Nest Lesvos- Lesvos, Greece (2018-2019)
Nest Samos – Samos, Greece (2019-2021)
Nest Athens – Athens, Greece (2021-2023)

Collaborative Teacher Project

The Collaborative Teacher Project (CTP) was created in 2015 to address the inequity in early education in Los Angeles. Over 4 years, CTP partnered with nine Title I LAUSD schools to transform classrooms and train teachers in child-centered pedagogies that nurture curiosity, flexibility, creative thinking, and democratic values. Through the program, CTP mentors worked side-by-side with LAUSD teachers in their classrooms – mentoring, modeling and inspiring deeply reflective teaching practices. Weekly mentoring visits provided intensive support for teachers to assist them in recognizing the competencies of children and the vital role teachers play in fostering critical, collaborative, and creative thinking.

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Programs for Children & Families