This Major Anti-Poverty Collaborative is Doubling Down on Support for Early Childhood

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Blue Meridian Partners prides itself on thinking big. Its mission is ambitious: “To transform the life trajectories of young people and families in poverty.” To do so, the funding collaborative makes hefty investments in strategies that aim to disrupt the cycle of intergenerational poverty. 

One way to disrupt that cycle is to intervene early, and a pillar of Blue Meridian’s approach is to provide support for children at the very beginning of their lives. The funding collaborative recently doubled down on a related commitment with a $46.5 million investment in HealthySteps. HealthySteps, a program of child development nonprofit ZERO TO THREE, partners with pediatric and family medicine practices to provide support for parents and ensure that young children are reaching developmental milestones. The evidence-based program has over 200 sites in 24 states and Washington D.C., and the Blue Meridian investment will allow the program to double in size by 2027. 

Blue Meridian Partners was created in 2016 as a project of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation (EMCF), and became an independent nonprofit in 2018, as the spend-down foundation prepared to close its doors for good. Over time, it’s become one of the biggest philanthropic funders of anti-poverty work, with deep-pocketed partners like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ballmer Group, MacKenzie Scott, the Duke Endowment, the George Kaiser Family Foundation and other prominent philanthropies (see a complete list of partners here). The collaborative has raised over $3 billion to date.

Blue Meridian supports strategies that target young people at different ages and stages. It invests, for example, in programs that work with youth growing up in foster care and formerly incarcerated young people. It also funds jobs and skills training programs for unemployed and underemployed young people, and an initiative to build the capacity of historically black colleges and universities. Early childhood has also been a consistent focus. Along with HealthySteps, which it began funding in 2015 with a $7 million planning and capacity grant and another $39 million in 2017 for scaling, Blue Meridian supports Nurse-Family Partnerships, a home visiting program for low-income, first-time parents. The collaborative has also funded place-based early ed projects like Get Ready Guilford, as IP reported.

Blue Meridian is one of several private and public funders that, seeing growing evidence of its importance, are now looking upstream to early childhood development as a way to tackle any number of problems, from poverty to incarceration.

“We very much see investments in early childhood as one of many potential solutions to the complex problem of poverty and economic immobility,” said Spencer Kympton, Blue Meridian managing director of portfolio strategy and management. “There’s a very large body of research that shows that investments in early childhood yield gains in education, lower long-term healthcare costs, and reduce the risk of involvement with the criminal justice system. And the benefits are not just for the children later in life, they’re for parents, too. All of that boosts economic mobility and social mobility and helps break the cycle of intergenerational poverty.”

Intervening early, reducing physician burnout

When Matthew Melmed, executive director of ZERO TO THREE, first started at the organization 27 years ago, making the case for early childhood was tough. “When I tried to talk with people about the science of early childhood development, they would look at me like I was from Mars,” he recalled. “It just wasn’t accepted; it wasn’t in the groundwater. The attitude was, ‘They’re just babies!’” 

Today, cutting-edge brain science and research into child development have increased our understanding of both the potential and the vulnerability of babies and young children — and the value of early care programs. HealthySteps, for example, places early childhood development experts in pediatric and family medicine practices. Pediatric settings turn out to be a venue where you can reliably reach a large number of families — and reach them early, when interventions will have the most impact. 

“It turns out that 90% of families take their children in for well-child visits,” Melmed said. “But what happened in the traditional pediatric setting was that pediatricians were not trained in early childhood development. They were trained on physical health issues, but not developmental issues or emotional and social issues. Nor did they have time to really dig deep and understand the concerns of parents, or to do the kind of screening that’s necessary to determine if a child has challenges.”

Developmental experts, called HealthySteps Specialists, work with pediatric teams to provide parenting support and flag development issues so children can receive early intervention if they need it. The program focuses on practices that serve large numbers of children who qualify for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), or are uninsured. 

An impressive body of research demonstrates the effectiveness of the HealthySteps method. A few highlights: Children who receive care at practices that participate in HealthySteps are more likely to receive developmental screenings, to be up to date on vaccinations, and their parents are less likely to use harsh discipline. Research also shows that HealthySteps has an 163% average return on investment to Medicaid annually. Finally, HealthySteps reduces provider burnout, according to a 2021 report. 

“Doctors say that the team-based approach really enhances care and their ability to effectively do what they need to do,” said Melmed. “At a time when so many healthcare workers are leaving the workforce, this is significant. The team approach is leading to increased provider satisfaction and less burnout and less turnover in the pediatric setting.” 

HealthySteps is also proving that it can scale, using philanthropic support as a springboard to access other funding sources. The organization’s goal is to reach over 1 million children and their families every year by 2032, and appears to be on track to get there. The program is in high demand and has local partners in a number of states. The HealthySteps approach has also sparked interest at the federal level: In March 2022, Congress approved $5 million in funding to introduce early childhood development specialists into pediatric practices, similar to the HealthySteps model, serving children who qualify for Medicaid, CHIP, or are uninsured. And President Joe Biden’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2023 includes $85 million to expand the model in community health centers in low-income neighborhoods around the country.

Bold visions

Early childhood is an area that has been overlooked by philanthropy until relatively recently, and it still receives only a small percentage of philanthropic funding, as IP concluded in its brief, Giving for Early Childhood Education.

Large investments are a keystone of Blue Meridian’s strategy, and distinguish it from many other funders, not just in the early childhood space. On its website, the funding collaborative spells out what it sees as a problem holding many worthy organizations and projects back: measly, restrictive grants that don’t do the job (it points out that $35,000 is the average grant size).

Philanthropy critics, including many here at Inside Philanthropy, argue that funders should unlock a larger percentage of their wealth if we’re ever to achieve deep social transformation and a more equitable society. In an early profile of Blue Meridian, IP pointed out that even large philanthropic investments will have limited value if they don’t address the baked-in inequities in the U.S. economy: “Ultimately, the deck will remain stacked against low-income youth as long as they’re growing up in a nation where large swaths of jobs don’t pay a living wage or benefits, where nearly all the gains from growth go to the nation’s most affluent households, and where predatory lending practices remain commonplace.”

Still — short of social transformation — the success and growth of programs like HealthySteps make it clear that large, targeted investments make a difference in the lives of children and families. Of course, HealthySteps meets a critical need and has demonstrated many benefits, but as Matthew Melmed himself points out, it would have been hard for it to develop and grow without major, consistent support. 

“I don’t think we would have been able to achieve the success that we’re seeing, nor would we be on track for our future goals without the investments [Blue Meridian] has made,” Melmed said. “Their latest investment is going to allow us to double our reach to over 700,000 babies and children a year over the next five years.”

Spencer Kympton summed up Blue Meridian’s approach this way: “Some of the most promising strategies out there are prevented from reaching far enough and fast enough without significant, long-term investment,” he said. “We’re prepared to invest as much as $100 million in a single organization that is pursuing a bold vision, as we’ve done with HealthySteps. This is transformative capital that is there over time. And it’s flexible. Organizations can think differently, they can dream differently, and they can pursue programs with much more vigor and rigor when that kind of capital exists.”