Identify cost-effective ways of ensuring that Minnesota’s children ages prenatal to 5, from low income or challenged families, are ready for success in school.

The Minnesota Early Learning Foundation will support programs and initiatives that educate, inform and empower parents, particularly in Minnesota’s fast-growing immigrant communities and other under-served communities.

• Educate parents:  Help parents better understand what children should know and be able to do at different stages of development to be prepared for kindergarten.
• Inform parents: Provide information that will help parents understand the characteristics of high quality early learning programs and services and choose the options that best meet their children’s needs.
• Empower parents: Pilot the use of early learning scholarships or other incentives to focus resources on serving children most at risk of entering kindergarten unprepared.

The Minnesota Early Learning Foundation will support programs and initiatives that will – through measurement, demonstration, collaboration and evaluation – guide development of an effective early learning system.

• Measurement:  Support measurement systems that assess a child’s progress and a provider’s effectiveness.
• Demonstration:  Identify and test ideas for bringing quality early learning cost effectively to children in at-risk or underserved communities.

• Collaboration:  Build local community capacity to increase school readiness through businesses, faith-based organizations, school districts and other community resources.
• Evaluations:  Develop an evaluation framework for selecting the best approaches from current programs and innovative approaches. 

From this work over the next five years, we will identify and build support for cost-effective, research-based approaches that use the public and private dollars invested in early learning in the most efficient ways possible.

Minnesota Early Learning Foundation is classified by the Internal Revenue Service as a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt, nonprofit organization.  Contributions are deductible.