Early Care & Education

Investing in Our Children’s Future Through Early Care and Education

Posted on by Sarah Weatherby

April is Month of the Young Child, a necessary time to celebrate and reflect on the critical role that early care and education plays in shaping the futures of our youngest learners. While access to high-quality early care and education is still out of reach for many families due to a lack of affordable options and limited availability, initiatives like our Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative allow us to be hopeful.       

Established in 2008, the Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative (ECEFC) serves as a powerful approach to change. This group was established to shed light on systematic and institutional gaps by directly funding advocates and change agents. The ECEFC is dedicated to its mission to increase the quality and capacity of, and access to, early care and education throughout the Washington, D.C. region. Supported and directed by corporate funders and local and national foundations, this multi-year, multi-million-dollar collective funding effort is making a real difference in the lives of children and families.

DID YOU KNOW? Only 32% of children from low-income families in the Washington, D.C. region are enrolled in high-quality early care and education programs1.

By investing in high-quality early care and education, we are giving our children the best possible start in life and building more robust, more equitable communities. 

When children have access to high-quality early care and education, they are more likely to succeed in school, have better health outcomes, and earn higher wages as adults. And when families have access to affordable, high-quality child care, parents can work and pursue their own goals, contributing to the economic vitality of our communities.

This Month of the Young Child, let’s celebrate the fantastic work of early care educators and organizations serving the early care and education community and commit ourselves to investing in our children. 

Together, we can build a brighter future for all children and families in our region.

Early Care & Education Funders Collaborative (ECEFC) FY 2023 Grant Recipients Announced

Posted on by Sarah Weatherby

The Women’s Foundation is excited to announce its FY 2023 grant recipients for the Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative (ECEFC)!

Since 2008, Washington Area Women’s Foundation has been home to the Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative (ECEFC), a collaborative investment model made up of 11 current members, including The Women’s Foundation, that pool dollars and make collective grant decisions toward early education systems change in the Washington, DC metropolitan region.

For the past few years, the ECEFC has focused on supporting the leadership and advancement of the largely women of color and immigrant women early education workforce. Now in its 14th year of funding together, the ECEFC has proudly invested over $300K this grant cycle in advocacy and grassroots organizing organizations, partnerships, or coalition models whose work will ultimately improve working conditions, well-being, and respect of those in the early care and education field, as defined by the needs and recommendations of early educators themselves.

To learn more about each of these awardees, please visit their website linked below and follow The Women’s Foundation via social media to keep up with their work and the work of our partnership.

FY 2023 ECEFC grant recipients (DC):

DC Action

DC Association for the Education of Young Children (DCAEYC)

DC Family Child Care Association

DC Fiscal Policy Institute

The Multicultural Spanish Speaking Providers Association

SPACES In Action

FY 2023 ECEFC grant recipients (MD):

Maryland State Family Child Care Association Inc

Nonprofit Montgomery

Prince George’s Child Resource Center, Inc.

FY 2023 ECEFC grant recipients (VA):

Northern Virginia Association for the Education of Young Children

Voices for Virginia’s Children

Celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month

Posted on by Sarah Weatherby

National Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 – October 15th) serves as a time to recognize the achievements and contributions of Hispanic American champions who have inspired others to achieve success. This National Hispanic Heritage Month, The Women’s Foundation is pleased to spotlight Identity, Inc., one of our Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative (ECEFC) grantee partners, who is ensuring a just and equitable environment for Latinx youth and their families.

Through its Workforce Experience Program in Early Childhood Education (WEX-ECE), The Women’s Foundation is pleased to provide funding to help Identity offer Latinx residents of Montgomery County post-secondary early education training in Spanish through a 90-hour certification. Since the start of this program, Identity has successfully increased the program’s participation from 10 to 30 students. 

This year, the program received 9 participants in the first cohort, and of these participants, 7 clients have completed the first 45-hour session, and a total of 6 clients have completed the full 90-hour training program. Out of 6 graduates, 3 students have successfully completed their internships, and 3 are starting their internship this month. 

Identity is also proud to announce that each student who has completed their internship has secured employment with some of them being employed at the same childcare location where they participated in on-the-job experience. Additionally, 1 student is registered for the preparation class to receive a Child Development Associate (CDA) credential, and is also interested in pursuing a degree in Early Childhood Education.

 At The Women’s Foundation we are committed to furthering our goal to ensure gender, race, culture, religion, class, and ability equity across early education systems. Today, and every day, we are proud to stand behind Identity as they work to serve the Lantinx community and help us achieve our goal.

How a Local Non-Profit Is Helping Women and Children Find Hope

Posted on by Sarah Weatherby

The experience of homelessness and gender-based violence bears heavily on individuals, especially women of color. The effects on children are even heavier.

At Washington Area Women’s Foundation, we are committed to improving the lives of women and girls in the Washington, DC region, and are pleased to support our grantee partner House of Ruth to provide a safe haven and sense of hope for women and children facing such challenges.

House of Ruth is a leading provider of housing and supportive services for women and children experiencing trauma associated with domestic violence, homelessness, mental health, substance abuse, and poverty in Washington, D.C.

Founded in 1976, House of Ruth has assisted more than 14,500 women and children and continues to serve more than 1,000 individuals each year through tailored programs that support clients’ development, well-being, and ability to rebuild safe, independent, and sustainable lives.

Our partnership supports House of Ruth’s programs like Kidspace Child and Family Development Center – a free and nationally accredited child development center for children ages six weeks to five years old. Kidspace provides trauma-informed care to families experiencing homelessness to ensure children are nurtured and receive the development skills needed to reach their highest potential. Through this partnership, House of Ruth is able to help women like “Jayda” who – like many others – has faced challenges and trauma and is looking to provide her children with an educational environment to help them succeed.

***

Jayda is a mother of two children enrolled at House of Ruth’s Kidspace Child and Family Development Center. She is expecting and is looking forward to enrolling her third child as well. At Kidspace, Jayda has formed strong relationships with the staff and other parents. She is very involved – often advocating shared concerns from fellow parents and utilizing available resources that allow her to seek advice on how best to support her children’s development while improving her well-being.

When Jayda has a question, she is able to reach out to House of Ruth’s Family Engagement Specialist where she receives parenting advice and techniques that she can effectively implement at home. When she had concerns about her daughter’s ability to manage emotions and express herself, Kidspace was instrumental in developing solutions to help her daughter communicate. When she went through a domestic violence situation, House of Ruth connected her to its Domestic Violence Support Center to receive counseling.

Jayda lost her job due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic. Since then, House of Ruth has been working to find her living space that will meet her family’s needs and provide encouragement and support as she looks to secure a new position and get back on her feet.

We are proud of the work House of Ruth is doing in our community and for women like Jada.

To learn more about House of Ruth, visit https://houseofruth.org/.

Washington Region Early Care and Education Workforce Network Implementation Plan For Competency-Based Career Pathways

Posted on by Jennifer Lockwood-Shabat

ABOUT THIS IMPLEMENTATION PLAN

This plan was prepared by FSG through the generous support of the Washington Area Women’s Foundation and its Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative.

FSG

FSG is a mission-driven consulting firm supporting leaders in creating large-scale, lasting social change. Through strategy, evaluation, and research we help many types of actors — individually and collectively — make progress against the world’s toughest problems. Our teams work across all sectors by partnering with leading foundations, businesses, nonprofits, and governments in every region of the globe.

We seek to reimagine social change by identifying ways to maximize the impact of existing resources, amplifying the work of others to help advance knowledge and practice, and inspiring change agents around the world to achieve greater impact.

Washington Area Women’s Foundation

Washington Area Women’s Foundation is the only public foundation dedicated to increasing resources and opportunities for women and girls in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area. We mobilize our community to ensure that economically vulnerable women and girls in the Washington region have the resources they need to thrive.

Washington Area Women’s Foundation established the Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative in 2008, as a multi-year, multi-million dollar collective funding effort. The Collaborative is supported and directed by corporate funders and local and national foundations.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

In April of 2015, the National Academy of Medicine and the National Research Council released a report, Transforming the Workforce for Children Birth Through Age 8: A Unifying Foundation, that is both ambitious and visionary in its recommendations for how to transform the workforce and systems that serve children from birth through age 8, or third grade.

To catalyze implementation of the report’s recommendations, the National Academy led a national “Implementation Network” of states across the country working to implement recommendations from the report. Our Washington Region Early Care & Education Workforce Network formed as one of the initial state networks, representing different sectors in early care and education (“ECE”) as well as the geographies of Maryland (Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties), Virginia (Alexandria, Arlington, Fairfax Counties), and Washington, D.C. Our region decided to form a team based on the unique needs in our region, including better serving our multi-cultural immigrant population with high numbers of dual language learners; embracing that the ECE workforce in our region is highly transient across state lines and thus could benefit from transferable credentials and compensation levels; and counteracting the lack of connectedness to a valued profession and to peers in ECE.

Our project purpose: “Mapping competency-based career pathways that are linked to quality and compensation and can be used across the region” will result in two concrete, connected deliverables:

Deliverable 1: 

Career pathways document

·   Document based on existing ECE professional credential/knowledge/competency frameworks in our region that establishes a practical and common set of quality standards for competencies at different levels, including suggested compensation levels, that are linked to identified competencies.

Deliverable 2:

Blueprint for an implementation mechanism

·   Certification/credential process that assesses and verifies competencies among the region’s ECE professionals according to the competency levels defined in the career pathways document and that establishes suggested compensation levels that correspond to the certification/credential.
Initial feedback on this project has been gathered from dozens of ECE stakeholders in the region and overall this idea has been met with a positive response. Developing the final deliverables, ideally over the course of 12 months, will require a highly collaborative process of further engaging stakeholders in the region. Moreover, research will be conducted to better understand how to create a career pathways document that is clear and user-friendly; what the competencies should be at each level of the pathway; how the competencies can be assessed and verified by a third party; and what the cost and benefit will be of achieving compensation commensurate with demonstrated competencies.In order for these deliverables to be used in practice, the region will need to create supporting infrastructure, for example shared services and practices related to substitutes, mentors, and/or benefits administration. This project will explore the feasibility of this kind of supporting infrastructure.

For the thousands of dedicated ECE professionals in our region, we hope this project will result in greater awareness of where they are on the career pathway; greater ability to engage in continuous improvement of their competencies; increased compensation and compensation alignment among early education and learning settings; and greater connectedness to a valued profession and to peers. This is in service of the ultimate outcome of this work: children in the region benefit from high quality early childhood experiences that foster positive learning and development.

 

DOWNLOAD AND READ THE FULL IMPLEMENTATION PLAN HERE.

Reflections on the Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative

Posted on by John "Skip" McKoy

Editor’s Note: Fight For Children was a part of the Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative for four years before leaving in 2014. Skip McKoy, Fight for Children’s Director of Programmatic Initiatives, shares his reflections in this guest blog post.

Fight For Children, SkipAt the end of June, Fight For Children will transition off of the Washington Area Women’s Foundation’s Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative to focus our attention on Joe’s Champs, our early childhood, school-based education program. We developed Joe’s Champs to provide principals, assistant principals, and teachers with professional development and mentorship opportunities focused specifically on students ages 3-4, a period sometimes overlooked by educators but vitally important to a child’s academic and social development. Without the extensive discussions with funders of the early childhood space—including those we met through the Collaborative—we would not be as confident in the success of Joe’s Champs as we are today.

When Fight For Children joined the Collaborative in 2010, we were primarily a grant-making organization.  The Collaborative provided us with an opportunity to engage with and learn from other local organizations interested in supporting early childhood development. As Fight For Children shifts from a grant-maker to an organization that designs and runs its own programs, the Collaborative remains a valuable resource for us, other local funders, and early childhood education leaders.

As I reflect back on our four years as a Collaborative member, I am grateful for the many opportunities and lessons learned. Here are a few that stand out to me:

  1. On the Collaborative, Fight For Children has had the opportunity to join forces with other organizations to leverage our impact on local children. For example, in 2013, as a member of the Collaborative we contributed to the support of ten early childhood education projects, in addition to the projects we support on our own.
  2. Fight For Children has a small staff that goes into the community throughout the year to research potential organizations with which to partner. Being part of the Collaborative exposed us to projects otherwise unfamiliar to us, given our limited resources.
  3. As a non-profit focused on children within DC City limits, Fight For Children staff do not readily have opportunities to learn about innovative approaches occurring elsewhere in the DC, Maryland, and Virginia region. The Collaborative has facilitated our experiences with early childhood education and development projects outside of DC, which we were then able to reference during our development of Joe’s Champs.

Any of these reasons alone would be a powerful incentive for an early childhood funder to join the Collaborative. But, there is another value-add to being part of the Collaborative: the group of funders* represented at the table are all well-respected and thoughtful. They represent a cross-section of foundations and corporations dedicated to improving early childhood care and education in this region. Having different organizations bring to light the multiple sections of the proverbial early childhood education elephant provides a better sense of the big picture, allowing each of us to be more thoughtful change agents and resulting in an even greater, systemic impact.

*The Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative currently includes: The Boeing Company, Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, The J. Willard and Alice S. Marriott Foundation, Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, PNC Foundation, Richard E. and Nancy P. Marriott Foundation, Washington Area Women’s Foundation, and Weissberg Foundation.

Funders Work Together to Influence Local Early Childhood System

Posted on by Jessica Zetzman

By Stacey Collins, PNC Foundation and Karen FitzGerald, The Meyer Foundation

sponsorship-fpo-2Six years ago, Washington Area Women’s Foundation launched the Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative, an effort to bring together local and national funders to increase the quality and capacity of, and access to, early care and education in the Washington region.  We – Stacey Collins of PNC, and Karen FitzGerald of The Meyer Foundation – are pleased to serve as the Collaborative’s current co-chairs.

Many of us on the Collaborative have focused on the value of investing in early childhood for many years. However, early childhood issues have recently taken center stage in national conversations.  As a group of funders investing locally, we know that high-quality early care and education can help close the “readiness gap” for low-income children entering kindergarten.

We invest together through the Collaborative to influence systems-level change.  We seek to influence the quality and capacity of early care and education options, and to ensure that low-income families in our region have access to these options.  This year, our grants include local advocacy investments to preserve and increase public support for early care and education, and investments in the professional development of early care and education providers (to increase the quality and capacity of programs in our region, and to support the career advancement and earnings of the predominantly female workforce).

Beyond our grantmaking, how does working as a collaborative influence our individual approaches as funders and investors?

From my perspective, at PNC…

The collective voice is greater than our individual voices, even on the same topic. From feedback and advocacy to funding, the impact is greater when we work together.

As a collaborative effort, by design, we keep early childhood at the center of the conversation. We focus our investments around programs that create the biggest impact. It is not just about making more dollars available for quality childcare in the region, although that is important. It’s also about getting to know what influences, how trends and policies shift the way early childhood education (ECE) happens, and which organizations are on the cutting edge of driving those changes. Often, that means defining quality and really understanding what the programs we fund are doing to change the trajectory of ECE in the region.

I personally have learned so much from being a part of the Collaborative. It’s a group of smart and passionate advocates. Our discussions about program effectiveness, and how to assess that when no universal quality standard pre-K assessment tool exists, are a great way to learn from others. It’s an opportunity to delve into the “why” behind each other’s focus areas.

From my perspective, at The Meyer Foundation…

Pooling resources and focusing on the entire ECE system – rather than on individual child development centers – helps Meyer have a bigger impact in ECE than we would have through our individual grantmaking.  We fund some ECE work in our education program area, but we don’t focus on it.

The Collaborative gives us the chance to learn more about ECE from funders who know more about the issue than we do. We especially value the opportunity to work alongside corporate and family foundations, who share our commitment to the issue and whose different perspectives make for rich discussions and grant deliberations.

The Collaborative has elevated for us the issue of ECE quality so that it is now an important priority of our grantmaking in this area.

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Click here to learn more about the Collaborative.

The Early Care and Education Funders Collaborative currently includes: The Boeing Company, Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Foundation, Fight for Children, Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, PNC Foundation, Washington Area Women’s Foundation, and Weissberg Foundation.