Gabriella Freyre

Gabriela Freyre-Calish, M.S.W., has been a research associate with the UConn UCEDD for the past 30 years in a training and capacity-building role. She began serving as the project coordinator of the Niños Especiales Outreach Training Project, which focused on the scaling up of a culturally sensitive model of early intervention to families of Latino heritage. Freyre-Calish has also trained childcare providers and provided TA through strategic planning for ten state teams on childcare inclusion of children with disabilities. She was also on the Research and Training Center on Service Coordination and the Role of Families in their Children’s Learning. Most recently, she has been coordinating an online hybrid training program in early intervention and an online curriculum for medical homes for the CT Department of Public Health. She offers training to early interventionists in CT in Spanish and assists families who are monolingual in Spanish in accessing and utilizing early intervention, childcare, and medical services. She is the consumer advocate and coordinator of the CT UCEDD Consumer Advisory Council and the family faculty coordinator for the CT LEND program. She has assisted the ECPC with strategic planning for states receiving intensive TA. She is the service coordinator for her sister, who has severe disabilities and lives with her family in Peru. She has twin sons, one of whom has learning disabilities and is legally blind, and they are both in college. She is bilingual and bicultural.