Giving Compass' Take:

• The Foundation Center interviewed directors from the Heising-Simons Foundation and the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative about an interactive map that provides information on the funding landscape of early childhood care and education. 

• Can you use this tool to inform your giving? Where can your funds do the most good? 

• Read about early childhood education's return on investment.

This month, the Heising-Simons Foundation, the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, and Foundation Center will be launching a joint effort to map the last ten years of philanthropic giving in the field of Early Childhood Care and Education. The resulting interactive map of the funding landscape is publicly available and offers a valuable starting place for funders and practitioners to explore historical giving data in the context of demographic and education indicators.

The map also includes deep dives into the evidence base around professional development and family engagement efforts, two areas of particular growth and interest to the field.

In advance of the launch, we spoke with Barbara Chow, director of the education program at the Heising-Simons Foundation, and Shannon Rudisill, executive director of the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, about the project.

Foundation Center: Tell us about your motivations for commissioning and/or participating in this effort.

Barbara Chow: Well, we were about to start a strategic planning process, so naturally, the first question we set out to address was, how does our past and future funding fit into the larger funding landscape? We recognized that our understanding of the landscape was largely anecdotal as opposed to empirical. So, our interest was in figuring out whether what we had assumed to be true could be validated by grants data.

Read the full interview about early childhood funders collaborative by Gabi Fitz at Philanthropy News Digest.