Greenville Magazine - April 2008 - (Page 19) Five-year-old Janie Dunlap plays a computer learning game in the children’s area of Hughes Main library. the public treasury for every $1 spent on highquality child development services to children in poverty. If you had a chance for that kind of return, wouldn’t you invest? Mack Whittle, chairman, CEO and president of South Financial Group, knows he would. At the recent Fifth Annual Childcare Summit, organized by The United Way of Greenville,Whittle laid out the issue from a corporate perspective. “Early childhood education impacts every employer. It is a business issue.We cannot cultivate a vibrant, competitive economy in South Carolina without a founda- tion built on the ability to prepare our workforce with a quality education, which must start in the very early stages of childhood development,” he stressed. More than 17,000 of Greenville County’s children live in poverty, according to the 2004 Census estimates, and nearly 6,000 of those are under age six – the critical years for healthy brain development. Scott Dishman, director of special projects for A Child’s Haven, a treatment program for children whose development has been delayed by poverty, neglect and abuse, and former chair of the Greenville Forward/Vision 2025 Family & Social Services Task Force says, “Imagine the impact on our community if we were able to fundamentally improve the futures of 17,000 april 2008 | Greenville MaGazine 19
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