Our Work
The BUILD Initiative partners with state and community leaders across the country to promote equitable, high-quality child- and family-serving systems that result in young children thriving and learning. Explore the map to see our major projects in each state.
Learn more About BUILD here. Explore the map below to see our major projects in each state.
Working With Us
BUILD partners with public- and private-sector systems leaders to establish state policy, provide services, and build their advocacy efforts for children from birth to age five.
We help leaders break down the barriers to coordinated and collaborative action by:
- Reforming existing statewide systems.
- Improving connections and feedback loops between local collaboratives and state systems.
- Providing support inside (government)/outside (advocacy) as well as inside/across state agencies and departments.
- Maximizing federal grant opportunities.
- Helping solve problems.
- Testing new approaches and strategies.
- Strengthening commitment to and action on behalf of racial equity, cultural understanding, and linguistic inclusion.
Our expert staff and consultants in early child systems building offer a wide range of services and support to states, including:
- Providing tailored and timely technical assistance to leaders in partner states.
- Building capacity within states.
- Facilitating cross-state learning communities that share new strategies, the latest research, promising practices, and exploration of implementation challenges.
- Fostering a collaborative environment within and across states, peer sharing, and access to expert resources to improve efficiency, spark innovation, and nurture leadership.
- Serving as a knowledge broker by highlighting early childhood systems strategies and spreading ideas and successful innovations.
- Supporting new and emerging leaders.
- Working to ensure diversity and equity in all aspects of early childhood systems building.
- Informing and influencing state and national conversations and policy decisions by highlighting emerging issues, innovative approaches, best practices, results, and lessons learned from the field.
- Promoting early childhood systems work that identifies and addresses the root causes of inequities and supports state remedies to address them.
- Providing state-specific and cross-state documentation and evaluation of successes, challenges and opportunities to feed into a cycle of improvement within states.
Explore Our Projects
Partner State Services
BUILD currently works with seven state partners — Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Oregon, Ohio, South Carolina, and Washington State — and the District of Columbia.
Early Care and Education Quality Initiatives
BUILD supports state and community efforts to ensure that all families, particularly those in communities that have been historically marginalized, have access to the quality care and early learning opportunities that will support their children to thrive in the settings that best meet their needs.
Prenatal-to-Three Capacity-Building Hub
BUILD manages the PN-3 Capacity-Building Hub which works with prenatal-to-age-three state and community leaders and coalitions committed to ensuring that pregnant and parenting families, infants, and toddlers have the support they need to thrive.
Harnessing Opportunities for Positive Early Childhood (HOPE)
This multi-state BUILD project emphasizes the need for state leaders to engage in sustained outreach to communities marginalized by disinvestment and racial inequality as it purposefully listens to intended beneficiaries of state programs and services.
Suspension/ Expulsion
BUILD works to reduce suspension and expulsion from early care and education settings, an issue that affects preschool children three times as often as children in K-12 and in which stark racial and gender disparities persist.
Home-Based Child Care
BUILD assists state leaders as they examine how to support home-based child care providers and the families who rely on home-based care for their children; home-based child care is an effective yet under-funded form of care that is well positioned to meet the needs of families who face the greatest barriers to accessing care and early learning opportunities.
Emerging Bilingual Learners
BUILD supports state actions to improve the quality of early learning for emerging bilingual learners so they can achieve the long-term benefits of bilingualism.
Equity Leaders Action Network
The ELAN is a BUILD strategy through which early childhood leaders across states, tribes, and territories work to identify, address, and act on inequities based on race, ethnicity, language, and culture in our early childhood state systems.
Maximizing Federal Funding
BUILD helps states make the most of federal early childhood funding opportunities by providing technical assistance and consultation including in grants competitions before grants are awarded, during the grant implementation process, and in documenting the impact of federal funds.
Financing
BUILD helps states understand the complex funding mix that supports the delivery of birth-to- five programs and services to children and families, where the gaps are, and how to leverage and sustain the funding.
Community Systems Building
BUILD helps state leaders tap into community expertise and channel it into responsive policymaking.
