Listen deeply to communities and allow them to lead

Flexible support, locally led.

The Foundation made some key decisions about the approach they would take for Starting Smart and Strong. These decisions would prove prescient in the initiative’s success in the months and years to come. 

Elements of Starting Smart and Strong’s approach:

• The initiative was place-based. The Foundation chose to invest in local communities to build coordinated support for children to learn as they grow. The Foundation chose to collaborate with local leaders to try out new approaches that could eventually act as models for statewide reform. 

• Communities had flexibility to adapt and respond along the way. The Foundation gave communities leeway in choosing what areas of reform to focus on and to make changes to their strategies and areas of work over time. 

• It had a long time horizon. Understanding that lasting community change takes time, the Foundation invested $500,000 per year for ten years in each community.

• It placed early childhood funding inside school districts and supported mid-level leadership. The initiative funded early childhood administrative positions and built out training programs for principals and other mid-level leaders.

• Investments supported technical assistance, evaluation, communications, administration of the Early Development Instrument, and partnerships with groups like the New Teacher Center and the Early Learning Lab. Embedded technical assistance providers Whitcomb Hayslip, Andrea Youngdahl and Chris Sciarrino brought years of local experience, existing relationships in each community and expertise in areas like early learning, systems change and cross-sector partnership. The TA provider model built a critical link between the Foundation and community, holding, for example, difficult conversations when strategy adjustments were needed. 

• Communities developed meaningful indicators of interim progress toward longer-term change. Engage R+D, a key partner, led a developmental evaluation of the Starting Smart and Strong initiative, paying particular attention to community ownership of and capacity to use their own data. For example, they developed a tool to help each community to reflect on—and document—progress in building a comprehensive early childhood system. 

• It placed value on listening deeply to communities and allowing them to lead.  For example, instead of dictating which ready-made solutions communities should adapt, local leaders decided which parts of their work made sense to scale and what approach they would take.