The mission of the Center on the Developing Child is to leverage science to enhance child well-being through innovations in policy and practice and, specifically, to translate advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, genomics, and the behavioral and social sciences into creative, new strategies for action. The Center is committed to working collaboratively with scientists, scholars, policymakers, policy analysts, practitioners, and other creative thinkers who are motivated to engage in the kind of transformational thinking that is needed to drive significant innovation in early childhood policy and practice.
Across the nation and around the world, efforts to improve early childhood policies and practices typically emphasize quality of implementation, professional skills development, and expanded access to services. These vitally important objectives are promoted through a broad array of activities and offer a critical foundation for improvement. The mission of the Center’s multifaceted commitment to catalyze innovation is to build on those efforts and mobilize scientific knowledge in the service of generating and testing new intervention models to produce substantially greater impacts. The importance of fresh thinking is particularly critical for disadvantaged children and families whose needs are not addressed adequately by existing programs and for whom society pays considerable future costs in remedial education, economic dependence, increased medical care, and the burdens of crime and incarceration.
The Center has selected three content areas as priorities for attention:
- Reducing developmental barriers to learning.
- Strengthening the early foundations of lifelong health.
- Enhancing the resources and capacities of the family environment.
Each area reflects a key element within the Center’s core theory of change and, therefore, presents an explicit focus for fresh thinking.
Strategy
In order to mobilize science, creativity, and experience-based pragmatism in a way that achieves this ambitious goal, our approach will be defined by:
- Creating an environment that nurtures new ways of thinking, supports strategic risk-taking, and values the importance of learning from failure to successfully develop new theories of change that will lead to greater improvement in life outcomes for young children facing adversity.
- Adopting an expanded definition of evidence that includes well-established, scientific concepts as well as benefit-cost data and the results of randomized controlled studies to guide decision-making about the allocation of finite resources.
- Leveraging a common science base to guide collaborative problem-solving across the domains of education, health, and a broad range of human services to begin building conceptually integrated systems that are grounded in a shared knowledge base.
Central to the success of this work will be integrating expertise from a variety of sources and being guided by evidence-based theories of change. This will be accomplished through the active engagement of scientists and scholars, policymakers and analysts, service providers and advocates, entrepreneurs from the private and non-profit sectors, and creative thinkers from outside the early childhood field. Multiple mechanisms will be used to solicit this broad range of perspectives, including interviews, workshops, and communities of both practice and purpose. The scientific brain trust for this work is grounded in the coordinated agendas of the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child and the National Forum on Early Childhood Policy and Programs. Additional contributions will be made by other activities at the Center, including research on the biomarkers of early adversity and cross-disciplinary working groups focused on science-based intervention models. Building on this broadly inclusive process of idea generation, discovery, and synthesis, the Center is committed to creating an engaged community of creative thinkers and highly motivated implementers to collaborate in the design and testing of innovative policies and program models “on the ground.”
An Ecology of Innovation
Three core elements of an overarching ecology of innovation require attention:
- seeds—new ideas that offer the potential for substantially more effective policies and practices that are affordable, replicable, and sustainable;
- soil—the rich combination of people and contexts that cultivates promising seeds and catalyzes broader impact; and
- climate—the policy, professional, and funding environment that creates incentives and influences the allocation of resources.
Separately, each of these elements offers a promising platform for fresh, new thinking; together, they constitute a rich landscape for transformational change. In the world of early childhood policy and practice, as in any complex ecosystem, the highly interactive mix among climate, seeds, and soil will influence what takes root, what survives, and what flourishes. For each of the three content themes, gauging both the availability of promising interventions and the receptiveness of the field to new ideas will determine the kind of work that needs to be done in order to achieve significant results. Where promising interventions already exist, the challenge is to build a climate of receptiveness to promote broader implementation and to foster cross-fertilization in order to strengthen impacts. Where effective interventions do not exist, the challenge is to introduce exciting new ideas from the biological or social sciences into the intervention arena in order to stimulate fresh thinking and generate new models for testing in pilot projects.
