Breaking Bread with ECE Leaders

In May, we invited ECE providers to apply for grants to support initiatives that would improve their financial stability and sustainability, enhance their educator recruitment and retention efforts, address infrastructure or capacity challenges, or facilitate their ability to partner with other providers or nonprofits to expand programming or achieve efficiencies.

The Foundation’s Board of Directors approved $540,000 in ECE grants to 17 different providers when it met on September 26. And we are excited to announce that this is only the beginning.

We anticipate having a larger pool of dollars to allocate to ECE in 2026. To ensure we maximize our effectiveness, we recently invited seven ECE leaders to meet over lunch with staff and our Board President, Fred Haberman.

The purpose was to give these leaders an opportunity to tell us more about the challenges they face and how we might structure our support to be most helpful in addressing them. We were also interested in learning where they saw opportunities for collaboration and how we might make a difference beyond funding ECE services directly in areas like ensuring appropriate nutrition for the children they serve and effective parent engagement.

Not surprisingly, we heard from several attendees that familiar challenges like ensuring competitive pay for educators, attracting more young people to the ECE workforce, and investing in facilities were most pressing for them. But we also learned that there may be opportunities for collaboration in areas like transportation, nutrition, professional development, and shared staff that could benefit from our future grantmaking.