In the clinic, we sometimes see extraordinarily bright children, occasionally even under the age of 2. Are there any resources in the community for these low-income families and their gifted children?

This is a hard question for a variety of reasons, but the basic answer is a little disappointing, as there is not a lot. In more affluent subcultures, parents who are invested in the kids' achievements can search for and pay for a variety of experiences.

Current thinking about giftedness is that enrichment and broad experience is the best approach, so writers like Ellen Winner ("The Gifted Child") advocate a variety of music lessons, museum visits, foreign language exposure, origami classes, swimming lessons, whatever you can think of..... all of which take not only money, but those even more precious parental resources, energy, time and imagination. They also recommend following the child's lead, so if he is very interested in one or two areas, parents should facilitate those, for example, take him to the chess clubs if he's loving chess now, or help him find info on quantum theory if that's his passion..., but keep offering new arenas which might also interest him.

Formal diagnosis of giftedness is quite unreliable in toddler and even preschool years, and very smart kids may not test particularly well even if they are talking at 10 months and reading by 3. They are probably gifted, no matter how they test, and need lots of interesting things to happen, which mostly falls to the family to provide.

There is a gifted kids nursery school, Hollingworth, at teacher's college ( reference: A model program for precocious children: Hollingworth Preschool
Author(s): Wright, L. & Coulianos, C.
Source: Gifted Child Today, Prufrock Press September/October 1991 Vol. 14, No. 5, pp. 24-29 ) which I think you have to pay for.

Insideschools.org mentions a few gifted school age (kindergarten and up) programs for which you need to apply, within your school district or zone, by applying directly to the school. We have the Discovery program in Dt 6, at PS 98 for K-4th grade.
Hunter College is a state dept of ed school in manhattan which is free and based on IQ. Kids need to be tested by some one on their list of psychologists-call the #, a recorded voice tells you what to do. If the family can not afford the test fee there is a scholarship -reimbursement available. Entery is at K, 1st gr and then not again until 7th grade. That's it. It's a very good school and they dominate in ivy league acceptances.

Very smart kids are also quite easy to get in on scholarship to the higher level private schools , which have a hard time satisfying their needs for diversity, but they really need an involved supportive family if the kids are to survive.

Johns Hopkins has a very active CTY-Center for Talented Youth which offers summer programs for bright (99th %) 7th graders and up, and is now expanding into weekend programs and correspondence programs for grade school kids.
I'm sure there are lots more things I just don't happen to know about, but the idea is it doesn't have to be so specialized, it just has to be a lot.

Often these very high IQ kids have high IQ parents who have more ability to enrich the kids' intellectual lives than average parents have, but our society doesn't really notice kids with high potential they way it notices kids with deficits, so you talking with the parents about ideas for stimulation is often a big part of what they get, especially in the 0-3 age range.

Sorry it isn't easier. Any specific case, I would love to help brainstorm with you and the parent. But if the parent isn't interested, you're probably not going to get far. Yours, Harriet McGurk