Mom with tattooed arm holding and kissing child.

Young Children & Their Families

Partnering with communities so all children thrive


What We Work For

With a network of local leaders, we work to achieve better, more equitable outcomes for all the nation’s young children and their families.

Too many families with young children grow up facing conditions that challenge their full and healthy development. This is especially true for children of color and children in low income neighborhoods. Closing the equity gaps and achieving good outcomes for all young children requires innovation, accountability, and investment across multiple fields and addressing structural barriers to children’s success, including structural and institutional racism.

How We Do It

With community partners, we test and develop innovative, comprehensive local early childhood systems; share that learning with communities nationwide; support and sustain parent leaders; move effective approaches to scale; and advance policies that help parents succeed and young children thrive.

We convene the Early Childhood Learning and Innovation Network for Communities (EC-LINC), a network of innovators generating ideas on behalf of better, more equitable outcomes for young children and their families in their own communities and states—and nationwide.

In addition, we join with other initiatives, networks, and foundations to demonstrate how comprehensive community approaches can achieve better and more equitable outcomes for specific target populations.

We also support the voices and mobilization of parent leaders.

Our work will be successful when all children, youth, and families benefit from the community, policy, and system supports they need to thrive.

We connect communities focused on supporting and nurturing young children.

Through our work, we:

Support communities as they promote equity, early learning, child health, and family partnerships.

Drive positive change in early childhood systems by focusing on measurable outcomes and metrics.

Catalyze community involvement in the lives of young children by building networks and connecting stakeholders.

Develop and foster innovative interventions that connect the health and early childhood systems to legal partners.

Ensure and nurture opportunities for parent leaders by connecting them to resources and opportunities in our networks.

Our work will be successful when communities prioritize the safe and healthy development of children and function as a support system for families, parents, and other caregivers.

Recognizing that each community will prioritize the outcomes it seeks for its young children, we support community, systems, and policy efforts that seek to achieve the following core outcomes:

  • Pregnant women and young children are healthy.
  • Children are ready to succeed in school.
  • Children live in safe, stable, and nurturing families and communities.