The Alliance for Early Success is a 50-state resource for early-childhood advocates as they pursue the big, sustained impact that will ensure every child in every state, birth through age eight, has an equal chance to grow, learn, and succeed.
After years of advocacy, Zero to Five Montana—along with other advocates, parents, and providers—has succeeded in passing a new early childhood endowment: the new Early Childhood Special Revenue Account.
As state policymakers work to address the huge budget shortfalls created by the federal government’s enactment of H.R. 1, state early childhood policy advocates are the next line of defense. And they need big investments in capacity to get the job done.
Missouri advocates learned from Alliance network peers in Ohio as they created the grassroots network that advances an early childhood agenda by placing those most directly impacted by state policy to the forefront of advocacy.
Your Voice Matters, South Carolina’s centralized community feedback initiative, is showing impressive family response rates, shaping policies, and engaging and educating state legislators on the impact of supporting early childhood programs and services.
In recent years, a growing number of states have moved towards unified ECE governance to help administer the variety of programs states are responsible for, including child care subsidies, child care licensing, state-funded pre-K, IDEA Part B and Part C, child care quality improvement systems, and Head Start state collaboration offices. While these states pursue consolidation to add efficiency, others pursue are trying alternate strategies to reach the same goals.
As part of our celebration of this year’s Black Maternal Health Week (April 11-17), the Alliance is spotlighting a few of the maternal health organizations that you may not have heard about. The Beloved Early Education and Care Collective (BEE Collective) works in the southern part of South Carolina, outside of Charleston, and is focused on building on the assets of the pregnant people, children, and caregivers who are furthest from opportunity — work that creates the kind of deep community that heals itself and builds increasing power.
Maine’s Right from the Start Coalition—a diverse, bipartisan group of organizations working for high-quality and accessible early care and education—helped pass a multi-faceted child care bill and helped defeat proposed budget cuts.
The Alliance and the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment discuss CSCCE’s 2024 child care workforce index and how the index’s messages and findings can be used to drive policy change that centers the experiences of early educators in all 50 states.
TEAM for West Virginia Children is offering the community advocacy stipends to help partner organizations keep up the pressure and urge legislators to support funding for child care and other early childhood policies. Hundreds of community members and more than 50 policymakers have already participated in local events supported by the community stipends.
Alliance for Early Success convenings, connections, and community fueled the Bright Start Tennessee Dashboard–Tennessee advocates’ new, highly tailored early childhood data portal. Now that each of the Bright Start regions has access to the regularly updated dashboard, they’re better equipped to measure progress and champion state policies with regional and local data.
