The contest, now in its fifth year, awards up to $15,000 for ideas that advance early education in two categories: accelerate and envision. The “accelerate” track rewards tested ideas that now need refinement, and the “envision” track rewards ideas that have yet to be tried in the real world. Schools, learning centers, nonprofits and entrepreneurs alike pitch their ideas, and the best ones are presented to a panel of expert judges and a live audience who select three winners from each category. This year’s contest attracted 90 ideas from across the United States.
“There’s palpable excitement in the field of early education right now, and this year's Innovation Challenge showed us the kind of strategic, entrepreneurial thinking that can transform our understanding of what’s possible,” Stephanie Jones, co-director of the Saul Zaentz Early Education Initiative at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said in a news release.
Here are this year’s winners:
ACCELERATE TRACK
In first place, a YWCA center in New Britain, Conn., created an “incubator” project for prospective child-care businesses in 2022 and is now looking to expand. According to its website, the program offers entrepreneurs everything they need to become day care providers, including training about business literacy and practices, financial literacy, early childhood and licensing. Several groups have completed the four-month training process and built road maps for the future.
Second place went to Early Learning Ventures, a Colorado-based software company, for creating an application called Alliance CREDIBLE to simplify the process for submitting claims to the federal Child and Adult Care Food Program (CACFP). CACFP provides reimbursements to people providing healthy meals at care centers, including early childhood care facilities. The app offers a user-friendly interface, flags errors in claims for correction, tracks claims for all providers and integrates with software that tracks attendance and meal counts.
The audience choice was another Connecticut organization, the Friends Center for Children, that offers free housing for salaried educators. The program houses six teachers and is looking to grow that number to 24 by 2027.
ENVISION TRACK
First place went to an alliance of alternative schools in Louisiana that created a childhood development associate certificate program in which teenage parents can earn a certificate in childhood development before they graduate high school. The program includes education and internships.
In second place, Joyfully Engaged Learning, a nonprofit supporting early learning programs in Arkansas, created AR Choice Tri-Share, a cost-sharing model that lets employees, employers and the nonprofit split the cost of child care.
The audience choice for the "envision" category was Appalachian State University in North Carolina, which created a bachelor’s degree program with a concentration in child development.
