About

Mission

Our driving motivation is the need for greater impacts on reducing disparities in child health and development than either direct services for children and families or community-focused initiatives have been able to achieve by themselves. We are eager to partner with similarly motivated change agents at the intersection of developmental biology, science-guided practice, and place-based activism to catalyze fresh thinking about how to strengthen the early foundations of educational achievement, social and economic mobility, and lifelong physical and mental well-being. We celebrate the positive effects of current best practices and embrace constructive dissatisfaction with the status quo. We believe that setting a higher bar is the sign of a dynamic and healthy field.

Objectives

Our three objectives are designed to advance this mission by extending the boundaries of the early childhood ecosystem. We are particularly focused on the prenatal period and first 2-3 years after birth, when developing brains and other biological systems are most sensitive to both positive and negative influences in ways that can have immediate and lifelong effects.

Objective 1

Make the science of ECD 2.0 actionable for change agents working at a community or neighborhood level. The core concepts of this expanded framework are now well-supported by a “trilogy” of three working papers from the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child: Working Paper 15 (Connecting the Brain to the Rest of the Body, 2020), Working Paper 16 (Place Matters, 2023), and Working Paper 17 (A World of Differences, 2024). Building on this base, we will create complementary products for practical application in place-based work.

Objective 2

Partner with a small cohort of community- and neighborhood-led that are motivated to integrate the science of ECD 2.0 and new measurement tools into their work. In current discussions, we are exploring which ECD 2.0 concepts are most relevant and how enhanced capacity to measure stress activation and resilience in young children might be helpful to those who are setting priorities for community- or neighborhood-led action as well as assessing variation in response to interventions.

Objective 3

Informed by ongoing progress on objectives 1 and 2, explore how to help change agents across the early childhood ecosystem incorporate lessons learned about strengthening the foundations of healthy development through place-based interventions. As we make progress in learning how effective community action can enhance the well-being of young children and the adults who care for them, we will work with policymakers across sectors to demonstrate how larger returns on investment can be driven by effective coordination among direct services for children and parents, place-based initiatives that dismantle structural barriers to healthy development, and cutting-edge science that explains how all these interventions get under the skin and into the bodies of young children in ways that affect early learning, readiness to succeed in school, adult economic mobility, and lifelong physical and mental health.