First Five Years Fund

At First Five Years Fund* (FFYF), our mission is to ensure that all children, especially those from low-income families, have equitable access to a continuum of affordable, comprehensive, high-quality early care and education (ECE) to support their healthy development and help them reach their full potential. To achieve our mission, we work to sustain and expand bipartisan support for early learning, while identifying and advancing new and innovative ways to increase access to high-quality early childhood education for children from low-income families. With so many children from birth through the age of five living in poverty, there is a tremendous need for greater investments and policies that expand access to high-quality opportunities that lay the foundation for a healthy and productive future.

FFYF was founded to be singularly dedicated to early childhood issues – and, more specifically, federal ECE advocacy. FFYF is unique and effective because of our:

Integration across the work

We employ three core divisions of labor – communications and public relations, policy and partnerships, and government relations and outreach – that are intentionally integrated, each playing a central role.

Proactive, bipartisan consensus-building

We engage in strategic consensus-building and seek to guide productive conversations to protect the issue from polarization. We identify areas of agreement, as well as where to engage and push. We lead conversations with what is persuasive to entry in the moment, considering all relevant context. We meet people where they are and help them get to where we want them to be.

Simultaneous short- and long-term approach

We create opportunities for strategic victories – great and small – that build toward our long-term goal, while employing careful discipline to ensure short-term political or policy victories do not compromise long-term support and funding for early learning and care from birth through age five.

Proactive advocacy while responsive to Washington’s current/changing agenda

We strategically account for, and take advantage of, the external environment including the realities of the legislative schedule and the political environment.

In 2020, FFYF launched a 501(c)(4) social advocacy arm – First Five Action Fund (FFAF) – to provide additional support for ongoing federal-advocacy efforts by increasing our Hill-facing capacity, expanding our reach, and expediting our education of Congressional offices. To learn more, please visit www.ffyf.org and www.firstfiveaction.org.