Explo Labo

Care initiatives for babies and toddlers face many challenges: working interculturally, encouraging parent involvement, motivating supervisors, staff shortages.... This reality often leaves little room for initiatives that bring a new dynamic to the operation, and meet evolving expectations around the unfolding opportunities of young children. With Explo Labo, we want to set up and test such innovative initiatives.

To this end, we'll create small local networks, consisting of professionals and volunteers from day-care centres, welcoming parents, artists, public workers from art houses, community centres, etc. In each of these networks, Lasso supervises trial projects tailored to the operation and the children involved. In the process, attention is also paid to the participating adults: to strengthening the cultural and/or pedagogical competences of the child carers, pre-school supervisors and artistic or cultural workers involved.

The applied methodologies are mapped and the results shared with practitioners from Brussels and Flanders. In this way, we ensure that innovative initiatives find their way into the field. Lasso is assisted in this by the Erasmushogeschool - Department of Early Childhood Pedagogy. After thorough analysis, they will summarise their experiences in a report with concrete recommendations. The project will run for three years (2022-2025) and is made possible through funding from the Flemish Government.