Susan Patrick
What is your role at UWSWVA and how long have you been a part of the team?
I am the Director of Childhood Success. I originally came on as the Manager of Childhood Success, then transitioned to be the Director.
What is your favorite part of your job?
My favorite part of the job is working with a team full of hard workers. Everybody on our team is going at 100 percent, all of the time. They don't even know how to give 50 percent; they can only give 100. I really enjoy our collaborative atmosphere. I also really enjoy actively trying to solve the puzzle of, “how do we support early childhood systems in our community?” and, “how do we build and expand on what we already have?” I love that part of the job because I think we're doing really, really important work. A community is only as good as the new citizens that it creates, so in pouring energy, time, money, and effort into childhood success, you're building a better community. It might take you 20 years to get there for those children to become the community of today, but you still have put in the effort. The effort that's put is long term investment, and whenever you invest into our younger generation, they will in turn later be inspired to invest in the generation that comes after them. It's just kind of like a snowball effect.
What does a typical day look like in your position?
So on any given day I get out in the community with stakeholders and partners. I might be working with my team on different initiatives, work plans, and goal setting for different initiatives, making sure that everything's happening the way it should. I might be hosting or providing a training session for childcare providers or partners throughout the community who are interested in different things. I might be reporting to our funders, budgeting, looking at funding for documents, just making sure everything is accounted for, that the money is being spent the way we said we were going to spend it, and that the work that we said we're going to do is getting done. So bottom line…meetings, lots of meetings! But they are focused around building a stronger support system for children, so they are worth it!
What is your personal motivation?
I am very invested in early childhood in general, foundational work that supports teachers who work with children, and work that supports families of children then supports children directly. My whole career has been focused on children birth to five, and making sure that they have really good learning environments, and good people to interact with because interactions between adults and children are sort of like the foundation of learning. That has been my whole life and my work now is really about building that bigger system that supports those caregivers, that supports policies in different counties and, at the state level, that provide for those caregivers that provide those learning environments. That's my personal motivation. I want children - every child in Southwest Virginia - to have the very best early childhood experience that they possibly can have. Whether that's in a family day home, in a childcare center, in a school or at their home, I want to make sure that they have an early childhood experience that provides them with opportunities to learn, grow, and develop to really lay a foundation for their future.
What’s your favorite event/program at UWSWVA?
I think that something that makes a huge impact on our community is the Preschool Development grant. It is a federally funded grant, but it's implemented in a regional way. I really think that it has the potential to change the face of early childhood systems in Southwest Virginia in a huge way. I think it has the possibility of creating better teachers that know how to have great interactions with children and can provide them environments that are conducive to learning, growth, and development. Now, we would not be able to do the work we do with the Preschool Development grant at the level we do if it wasn't for the Virginia Quality grant, which we use to buy materials for those classrooms and provide professional development for the Mixed Delivery grant, which we use to provide slots for children to be able to be in those classrooms. So it's all integrated. We can talk about our programs individually, but really, what we're talking about is overall childhood success. I love that that's the name of the department because what I think is important for us to do is make sure children can be successful.
What are some of your favorite hobbies?
I love to go to movies. That's kind of been a thing that my family has done for a long time. I'm a big reader, I love to read, and I love to be outside doing whatever I can be doing. I love adventure movies. Some of my all time favorites actually I was just watching the other day like Romancing the Stone and National Treasure.
What is something that is fun or unique about you?
I love to travel. And I've been to a lot of places and several different countries. So I love that. And I love to try the cuisine of different places. I always eat “weird” stuff in the different places I go. I loved Singapore, I thought it was really fun. What I liked about Singapore is that you get a whole different cultural experience, but everyone speaks English, too. So it's really fun and easy to get around in Singapore. I lived in Germany for years, I love Germany, and I really want to go back there. My son and I have been talking about traveling to Europe because I want to go back to Germany. I lived there when I was young, I was an adult, but I moved back to the States when I was 22, maybe 23. So I was there when I was 19 and came back when I was 23. I've been to Hungary, which was okay, I was there to study. I've also been to China, which was amazing. I was training some teachers and working while I was there. Hawaii is on my bucket list, I also want to go to Canada and Alaska. I've never been to Alaska, I've always wanted to go up there and see all the wildlife out there. It's kind of unimaginable.
Tell me about your favorite day at work in your current position.
A favorite day at work, I think, is any day we meet a goal, or accomplish something as a team, and we can come together with the team and say, “you know what? You guys did it! Everything that you have been doing has paid off and all the work that you've put in is worth it.” Fortunately, we get a lot of those days!
Do you have a quote or mantra that you always look to that is meaningful to your work here at UWSWVA?
The one we always say is, “teamwork makes the dream work.”
Another more personal quote would be “peace begins with babies”. This one was made famous by a former mentor of mine and it really speaks to the idea of the children of today being the foundation of society for the future.
What was your very first job and how do you use a lesson you learned in that job still today?
My very first job, I was a nanny, and I learned then that everything I do impacts the child in some way. Every decision I make, and that is still true to this day, every decision I make about how my team functions is going to impact a child. So I have to think about, “what is the impact of that on the children in our community?” Now, it's a bigger picture. It's always been that way though. I used to teach at the university level and everything I said, everything that came out of my mouth, influenced a teacher who was later going to work with a child and I had to be careful, think everything through, know what I was saying, and the same thing goes now everything you say, or do impacts a child in some way. Whether you know it or not, whether you realize it or not, it's like a ripple in the pond. So everything that I do, I have to make sure that I want to influence the child the way I want to, and not to have negative effects.
