About Us
our story
Casa de Corazón® is a Spanish immersion early learning program committed to providing socially responsible education to our children in a healthy, compassionate, intercultural environment.
Our vision
To intentionally increase the social impact of early childhood education through impeccable standards of professional development, honest communication, mutual respect, community engagement, accountability, and innovation in a supportive and caring learning environment.
What is intercultural?
Intercultural is beyond multicultural, which is where multiple cultures coexist alongside one another. Intercultural is beyond cross-cultural, which is where cultures learn from one another.
In intercultural communities, we connect with one another in a reciprocal, mutual, and inclusive celebration of all cultures. We strive for equality, justice, and meaningful relationship building that allows us to honor our heritage while respecting others. While we learn from each other’s cultures, we may also examine our own culture more deeply. Through intercultural community engagement, we allow ourselves to be changed.
At Casa de Corazón, our mission is to provide inclusive, diverse daycare services within the communities we serve. Our staff members as well as our enrolled children and their families engage in our intercultural community. As a result of this engagement, our lives are permanently enriched.
How Casa de Corazón was founded
Meet our Founder & CEO, Natalie Standridge. Natalie has been working in the field of Early Childhood education since 1999 and began her now multi-location program in 2002. Prior to her work experience she graduated with honors from the University of Minnesota receiving a bachelor’s degree in Family Social Science, a minor in Spanish, and an area of emphasis in cultural youth studies. Natalie’s interest in young children has been forming since she was one of them! As she grew up, her parents taught Lamaze and Infant Massage classes, led La Leche Leagues, and fostered pre-adoptive newborns. Natalie had heard more birth stories, taken more first aid training, and cared for more babies by the age of 16 than most people do in a lifetime.
But her inspiration to create something unique to the field of early education came when she needed child care for her own first born. After searching extensively, she couldn’t find anyone providing high quality, dual language child care. There were no Spanish immersion schools at the birth to 5 level in Minnesota. In fact, the popular belief at that time was that bilingual children suffered delayed brain development. The research that has emerged since then has changed everything. Now we know that bilingual brains are actually more healthy, complex, and actively engaged, and have higher levels of executive function. We also know that the brains of children under the age of five have more plasticity to process language using both hemispheres, and therefore their language learning includes more social and emotional processing in addition to the analytical processing that adult second-language learners use.
So Natalie created the program that today is Casa de Corazón. Casa is more than just a language program. It is a unique child care model focused on environmental consciousness, a caring approach to teaching, and intercultural learning. From making healthy food in-house to providing cloth diapering, Casa has incorporated social, environmental, and health priorities into a Spanish Immersion curriculum, providing a well-rounded option for the first education of each child.
With the demand for bilingual people exploding in the workforce in our increasingly bilingual society, the need for bilingual early education is increasing at a much faster rate than schools are opening. Natalie has seen this demand continue to increase over the years. As the pioneer in the industry, Casa de Corazón has started franchising to other markets in the United States to fulfill the high demand of our brand and services.
Awards & Credentials: Minneapolis & St. Paul Business Journal Women in Business, Star Tribune Movers & Shakers, Entrepreneur Hot Franchises to Own, 2020 EOS Core Values Contest Winner, 2021 University of Minnesota Distinguished Alumni Award
Natalie Standridge
Founder & CEO
Podcast
Want Results? Follow Your Core Values
Lead with empathy. Natalie Standridge shares how sticking to your values helps you lead, hire, and fire well. Natalie details the importance of emotional vulnerability in the workplace, her biggest wins as a leader and how EOS helped her face 2020 as a key worker.
Listen nowLeadership
Our team combines years of experience and a deep dedication to serving our families, employees, and franchisees.
20+ Years of Más Sonrisas, Más Calidad, y Más Corazón!
In 2002, Casa de Corazón began providing a well-rounded child care option to parents that incorporates language immersion and environmentalism into the core curriculum. With this achievement, we are the oldest Spanish immersion, NAEYC and Parent Aware certified child care center in the Twin Cities. Thank you to all the parents, teachers and community partners that have made this possible — we couldn’t have done it without you!