History

Nearly twenty years ago, the minister of Calvary United Methodist Church recruited Beatriz “BB” Otero to restructure his church’s childcare program.   BB accepted this challenge, and together with an extremely committed board and staff, created the Calvary Bilingual Multicultural Learning Center serving 15 children. The organization’s original name reflects its founders’ vision to provide quality affordable and accessible early childhood education to the children and families in its community. After moving to its current location in 1995 the organization retained its name to pay tribute to its first home.

Since the beginning, we have offered quality education and family support programs to hundreds of families and have achieved a number of accomplishments. Organizationally, we have evolved from a childcare center to a comprehensive family support organization. A transformation is attributed to committed staff, engaged parents and program participants and a strong network of external partners that daily complement our work.  Today, the organization serves infants, toddlers, preschoolers, youth, families, and manages the DC Bilingual Public Charter School.

A further testament to our success is the recognition from local and national organizations and funders including the Freddie Mac Foundation, the National Council of La Raza, Kellogg Foundation, Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Doris Duke Charitable Trust and Venture Philanthropy Partners of our leadership in the development of a community based integrated service model that address early childhood education, youth development, and family support needs on our neighborhood.

With the support of Venture Philanthropy Partners (VPP) and the guidance of the Biltmore Institute the past year has had us engaged in the development and implementation of a comprehensive strategic planning process aimed to design the management of our rapid growth and reaffirm the merit of our programs, service delivery model, and guiding principles. This process has led to two significant transformations for the organization; we have changed our name and reorganized our management structure.

The Naming Process
As we conducted our strategic planning process, we took care to consult with children, youth, parents, supporters and partners as has been our practice over the years. We repeatedly heard that our name was “too long”, that it conveyed a “religious affiliation” and that it portrayed a “limited perception” of who were are. We took this to heart and with the expert assistance of the Metropolitan Group embarked on a branding process. Many hours of reflection and discussion internally and through outside focus groups led to a clearer understanding of our brand, of how we are perceived by our community and how we can best convey what we hope to achieve.  So eighteen years since the first children entered our doors Calvary has made the move to adopt a new name: CentroNía.

“CentroNía” is derived from Spanish, Swahili and Esperanto, a universal language created in the late 19th century to help bridge cultures.  Centro means “center” in Spanish.  Nía means “our” in Esperanto and “purpose” in Swahili.  It is further complemented with a bilingual tagline

“growing, learning, leading”
“crecimiento, aprendizaje, liderazgo”

which speaks to CentroNía’s commitment to provide a continuum of educational programs to families and their children as they grow within CentroNía and to lead in the field of bilingual and multicultural education.