REFLECTIVE PIECE Thoughts on Promoting Capacity in Support of Child Well-Being Alan R. Pence University of Victoria “I said to my soul be still and let the dark come upon you which shall be the darkness of God . . . I said to my soul, be still and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love for the wrong thing; . . . Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought. So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” (T.S. Eliot, East Coker) I discovered these lines while engaged in an assessment of early childhood care and development programs in Trinidad and Tobago in 1999. The memory is clear—sitting in my hotel room looking out over the lush tropical vegetation, methodically going through a large stack of materials collected from various ECD projects in the country and coming across this quote, used to describe their philosophy in a newslet- ter put out by the SERVOL program (Pantin, 1984; SERVOL, 1998). The sensation for me was one of astonishment, like discovering an entire branch of your family tree that you did not know existed—a lost relation that bore telltale signs of kinship. The programmatic ‘family’ SERVOL resembled one that I had also been involved in developing over a number of years, albeit in quite different settings. My own particular branch of the family tree consisted of two sets of programs: the First Nations Partnership Programs (FNPP: 1989) and the Early Childhood Development Virtual University (ECDVU, 1995). The FNPP was well established at that point; this community-based undergraduate diploma program had been coopera- tively delivered with 7 different tribal organizations in western Canada Correspondence should be directed to Dr. Alan R. Pence, Early Childhood Development Virtual University (ECDVU), School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, P.O. Box 1700, Stn. CSC, Victoria BC V8W 2Y2, Canada; e-mail: apence@uvic.ca. Child & Youth Care Forum, 32(6), December 2003  2003 Human Sciences Press, Inc. 313