Julie Brown

Julie Brown is the owner and director of Best Friend’s Early Learning Center, where she has built a nurturing, multilingual community grounded in love, respect, and inclusion. With years of experience in early childhood education, Julie’s vision has always been to create a school where every child feels seen, heard, and valued — a place that celebrates language, culture, and connection as powerful tools for learning.

Her biggest inspirations are husband and 4 children. Spending time in her husband's home country of Brazil, and working with teachers from Brazil, exposed her to a culture and education system that embraces children as co-creators of knowledge, with a deep respect for the individuality, creativity, and potential of a child. Raising a child with autism has cemented a commitment to inclusion and reasonable accommodations that are needed for children with special needs to thrive.

Her work with teachers from Brazil led her to discover Paulo Freire, a Brazilian philosopher and educator whose thought leadership took him from Brazil, to Bolivia, to Harvard University, to Geneva. His book, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, and his ideas have inspired educators globally to adopt collaborative methodologies in classrooms that treat children as co-creators of knowledge, rather than students that merely receive instruction and knowledge from a teacher. At our center, our children are given the love, respect, and collective environment needed to feel safe and thrive.

Her work with her own child has opened her eyes to the struggle all parents of children with special needs have in navigating the healthcare system, schools, therapies needs, and more. She understands how the list can seems neverending. As a result, she has made it a point to have staff that can support parents in securing the resources needed for their children, including therapies directly in our classrooms.

Her education and plurilingualism has also cemented a deep commitment to language as a tool for brain development and learning. As a result, we go beyond traditional bilingual language models and fully embrace translanguaging in our centers, exposing our children to a variety of phonemic systems during their first years of life as the brain is rapidly forming the neural network that supports learning, memory, and emotional regulation.