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Grants for Early Childhood Education

Learn about grants for early education by browsing our curated list of top funders below. Members can also research early education funding opportunities using the search tool for Grant Finder. Become a member.

Key Funders

Funding trends in early childhood education

Abundant research shows that investing in quality early childhood programs delivers large social and economic returns across one’s lifespan – for both individuals and society. Well-educated children who experience safe, healthy childhoods become healthier and more productive adults. The Urban Institute notes that programs that are directed at young children and that reduce child poverty have especially high returns on investment in terms of better futures and lower spending on healthcare, criminal justice, and social services.

Philanthropy for early childhood typically works to complement government programs in providng and improving early childhood outcomes. Public spending for early childhood is relatively scant in the United States in contrast to other developed nations the OECD finds year over year. In its 2024 report on public investment in early learning, the Center for Early Learning Funding Equity at Northern Illinois University found that “At the national level, for every dollar spent on a child during their K-12 years, only 10 cents were spent on infants and toddlers and 22 cents were spent on preschoolers.”

Philanthropy, for a long time, echoed the tendency to fund early childhood education at a much smaller scale than  K-12 education. IN recent years, grantmaking for early childhood has increased as some large foundations and high-profile major donors have expanded their education docus to include ECE, as IP has found in our State of American Philanthropy brief on Giving for Early Childhood Education.

Philanthropists in the ECE space also increasingly collaborate to maximize their impact, through networks and partnerships such as the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative and Trust for Learning. 

Still, even as funding interests in ECE increase, grant dollars for early learning were expected to “remain modest relative to other priorities,” based on Grantmakers for Education’s Trends in Education Philanthropy Benchmarking 2023. Will this trend change if federal funding cuts decimate government programs for early childhood care and education?

What do early childhood grants fund? 

The overall aim of philanthropy for early childhood is to improve both access to and quality of early education. Within this directive, funders have honed in on several different grantmaking priorities. Grants for early childhood tend to fund direct services relating to quality childcare and early education. This grantmaking is often place-based and locally focused, but there is also a trend of grantmaking for national policy advocacy to increase public spending and improve government programs for early childhood. State and local budget advocacy – such as the work done by several grantees of the Raising Child Care Fund – will be more important than ever after federal funding cuts.  

Research grants related to early childhood support curriculum development, research into how to improve the quality of care, and research on the impacts of quality early childhood programs. 

Early childhood grantmaking also fund narrative change work that works to shift values around care work, as well as efforts to improve pay for early childhood educators. Another giving strategy includes funding kindergarten readiness, including literacy programs, “parent and me” programs, and other initiatives that promote parents as a child’s first teacher.Funders increasingly make grants to support social and emotional learning and “whole learner” approaches that look at education holistically, including wraparound services and connections with issues such as mental health, nutrition, and housing.

Gaps in early childhood funding 

In the past, philanthropy has complemented or built upon public funding for early childhood programs. As one funder put it in a Grantmakers for Education survey, “philanthropy hesitates to step in where government should be.”

With the U.S. government now threatening to abandon that post, how much will philanthropies committed to early childhood step up to fill enormous gaps? IP’s Connie Matthiessen reported that early childhood funders are having an “all hands on deck” moment in response to threats to Head Start, a core part of the nation’s care for early childhood that serves more than 800,000 children a year. Shannon Rudisill, the Executive Director of the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative, told Matthiessen that philanthropy cannot fill the gap that eliminating Head Start would create.

Inside Philanthropy’s ongoing coverage will follow how grantmakers and major donors who understand the importance of early childhood programs attempt to fill gaps and support advocacy to save public funding for this vital public good.

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Additional Resources

Early Childhood Funders Collaborative: the largest funder collaborative in the space, BUILD initiative, which operates in eight states, offers strategy, technical assistance, professional development and a national learning community focused on early childhood policies and systems.