The Early Childhood Agenda is making progress. This convening series hosted by Strategies for Children has brought together more than 400 individual advocates and partners. Participants have been meeting in five working groups to identify systemic challenges and set priorities.

Last week, participants attended a whole group meeting – dubbed “Bringing it all Together” and recorded in the video above – to talk across the Agenda’s working groups and ensure that the groups’ efforts are aligned and that any gaps in the work are addressed.

Among the themes that were discussed:

To ensure that families are financially secure, there should be a focus on:

• racial equity

• the cost-of-living spikes caused by inflation, and

• the many barriers that families face in securing child care support, including income thresholds and immigration status

To encourage high-quality, child- and family-centered programs, it’s essential to:

• emphasize how important early childhood development is

• point out the many ways that public policies and practices tend to ignore the science of brain development and early childhood

To have a thriving early childhood workforce, there should be:

• a recognition of how society fails to value caregivers, including early educators

• higher salaries and better benefits

• a focus on the workforce’s overall wellness

Key factors for building local partnerships and a robust infrastructure include:

• putting families at the center of efforts to design and implement programs

• the use of accurate, timely, and equity-centered data, and

• building on existing structures and partnerships

To ensure healthy beginnings:

• make it easier to access and navigate pediatric health care

• create culturally and linguistically sensitive materials and share them with families

• better educate health care providers about the early childhood system, and

• create opportunities for families to make decisions about programs that impact their and their children’s lives

The next steps for the Early Childhood Agenda include converting these ideas into actionable steps; including more local experts on early childhood and on data; maintaining a focus on adding mental health support, especially in the shadow of the pandemic; and bringing in more partners from within and outside of the early childhood sphere.

A survey will launch this week so participants can vote on each working group’s priorities and together we can identify the most urgent priorities for the early childhood field. 

Please join us in this work. You can check out the video of this meeting, and share it with your networks. You can also find more Early Childhood Agenda videos on our YouTube page. These videos are a great way to “catch up” on the Early Childhood Agenda’s work, especially if you haven’t attended a meeting yet. 

And if you’d like to attend future meetings, click here for December’s schedule. You’ll also find the Agenda’s new website here. Complete the sign-up form to be added to the contact list and receive regular updates. And stay tuned for information about the Agenda’s release event in January.

The Early Childhood Agenda is a new approach to improving the systems that serve young children and families. And the more people who join in, the more successful we expect this effort to be.