Inside a Media Funding Partnership to Get the Word Out about Early Childhood

The U.S. is trapped in a fog of cognitive dissonance when it comes to what we know about what very young children need to thrive, and what we’re actually doing about it.

Breakthroughs in brain science show that babies’ brains begin developing even before birth, and grow at a rapid rate thereafter. Quality early care and education nurtures and stimulates young, developing brains, and has been shown to have impacts that extend into adulthood. But access to affordable, quality early care programs is limited across the U.S., with operators facing prohibitive costs while parents struggle to afford sky-high fees. As early childhood expert Elliot Haspel wrote in the The Atlantic, “...child care simultaneously is too expensive for parents and brings in too little revenue for programs to operate sustainably.” To make matters worse, the field faces a serious workforce shortage, in part because early care educators seldom make a livable wage.

The result? Quality early education is still out of reach for far too many children, as a recent report by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER) concluded. The pandemic was a serious setback in terms of preschool access, but the problem long predated COVID. As Steven Barnett, NIEER’s senior codirector and founder, pointed out in the Hechinger Report, “In the 20 years since NIEER began collecting data on the state of preschool in America, we have seen only piecemeal steps forward and frequent steps back in funding and access for high-quality preschool programs across the country.” In sum, our early childhood education system is lagging far behind the science, and we are failing far too many of our youngest children.

The LA Partnership for Early Childhood Investment — a public-private collaborative between philanthropy, the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, First 5 LA and several government agencies — aims to to pierce the cognitive dissonance by getting the word out about early childhood development. Its latest move: a partnership with the Los Angeles Times.

The LA Partnership is underwriting the newspaper’s new early childhood initiative, which will expand the L.A. Times’ coverage of children from birth to age five and “explore the critical issues affecting California’s youngest residents, their parents, care providers and educators,” according to the announcement. The newspaper hired Jenny Gold, previously a senior correspondent for Kaiser Health News, and Kate Sequeira, who will serve as the audience engagement journalist, to anchor the initiative.

Parker Blackman, executive director of the LA Partnership, summed up the initiative’s goal. “It will help to have a public that better understands the value, the science, the impact of early care — not just on particular families, but on whole communities,” he said. “The Times is the paper of record — not just in Southern California, but for the entire state and for the western U.S. as a whole. So when policymakers and the governor's office and state agencies read stories about early childhood in the Los Angeles Times, that can have an impact on what goes into the governor's budget and on what kind of legislation gets prioritized. That’s what it’s going to take to get the kind of systemic change and government investment in early childhood that we really need to have an impact on this issue.”

A cross-sector partnership

The LA Partnership’s mandate isn’t limited to raising awareness of early childhood issues among policymakers and the public. It also invests in promising strategies to strengthen and increase access to early care services, including education, healthcare and development services.

Members include a long list of philanthropies and public sector entities. This recent initiative with the L.A. Times was backed by the Ballmer Group, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation, Heising-Simons Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Sobrato Philanthropies and Stein Early Childhood Development Fund (at the California Community Foundation).

The partnership first got its start with Richard Atlas, formerly a partner at Goldman Sachs, who died in 2020. Atlas’ wife Lezlie had a background in child development, and the couple were committed to investing in young children as a way to create more opportunities for families living in poverty.

The couple started a small family foundation in the late 1990s, but Atlas wanted to have more of an impact. “Rich was frustrated because he felt like, ‘I am writing checks and making grants and supporting these great organizations, but I don't know that I'm moving the needle on the issues in L.A. County,’” Blackman said. “It’s a county with nearly 10 million residents; if it was a state, it would be Michigan by size and Pennsylvania by budget. It's just so big and complex.”

At the time, government and philanthropy were working on early childhood issues, but they weren’t necessarily talking to each other or combining efforts. Atlas began having conversations with city, county and philanthropic leaders to figure out if and how they could work together. “The idea was to find ways to blend and braid public and private dollars to enhance the public sector’s ability to better serve and support the lowest-income families with children birth to five,” Blackman said.

In 2007, the LA Partnership was established as a nonprofit. In 2011, First Five LA made a $1 million grant, which the partnership matched, to create the Baby Futures Fund. “Ever since then, we’ve worked with philanthropy to have them gift dollars into our pooled Baby Futures Fund, or to align dollars if they prefer to do it that way,” Blackman said. “The goal isn't to raise money for the partnership, it's to deploy dollars effectively.” According to Blackman, over the last 10 years, the organization has raised and given away over $13 million, specifically focused on system change.

The LA Partnership invests in the Los Angeles Home Visitation Consortium, which provides home visits to low-income pregnant and new mothers and their babies, and administers The Village Fund, a public-private-community partnership that works to prevent Black maternal and infant mortality. Leading up to the 2020 election, it organized efforts to ensure that L.A. County political candidates were informed about early childhood issues.

Building a firewall, embedding in community

The early childhood initiative at the L.A. Times is just getting off the ground, but this isn’t the the LA Partnership’s first effort to amplify early care issues via the media. Over a decade ago, the partnership began funding a similar project at KPCC radio in Los Angeles, creating a dedicated early childhood beat headed by journalist Deepa Fernandes. Fernandes initiated major investigations, including features on bilingual education, pregnant women in prisons, the shortage of summer preschools in Los Angeles, and the impact of toxic stress on childrens’ mental health.

So when the L.A. Times expressed an interest in doing something similar, Blackman said it was easy to set up. Nevertheless, newspaper staff were particularly concerned about editorial independence, and that funders would try to influence the coverage.

“They were interested, but had some questions,” Blackman said. “How do you do this? What's the firewall so philanthropy isn’t putting its thumb on the scale? We said, look, here's how it works. We've aligned dollars amongst four or five funders to do three-year grants, so KPCC has enough runway: They know they can count on this for at least three years at a time. And then we never talk to the reporters, or anybody in the newsroom. There's just a firewall. We've never breached that.”

At KPCC, Blackman communicates with the development team if there are questions about implementation or funding details, and he has a similar connection with a staff member on the public affairs side at the L.A. Times. But Blackman is adamant that neither he nor anyone else at the LA Partnership would ever pitch story ideas or contact the reporters. “That crosses the firewall. We would never do that,” he said.

Six years ago, KPCC added a second early education journalist, a community engagement reporter, to inform the coverage by spending time on the ground talking to parents, providers and others. The L.A. Times decided to do something similar. As the audience engagement journalist on the project, Kate Sequeira, who is bilingual, will be working to gain a community perspective on early childhood issues.

There is no guarantee, of course, that more news coverage of early care issues — or even more awareness generally — will fix our ailing system. But changing systems is going to require a shift in attitudes about how we care for our youngest children. The idea that it takes a village to raise a child is a well-worn cliche, but as a society, we seldom act very village-like. Most parents find that once they’re expecting a baby, they’re on their own — at least until that child is ready for kindergarten.

“We have bought into this individualistic approach: Everyone is supposed to lift themselves up by the bootstraps,” Blackman said. “That has significantly influenced how we think about family: It's your child and you're in charge of raising them. Instead of, we're going to be there to support you so you and your child can thrive. Whatever that means for you and your family to thrive, we're going to be there to help you achieve your dreams. When we do that, everyone benefits.”

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