8.4 Public-Private Partnerships

Lead Agencies must demonstrate how they encourage partnerships among other public agencies, Tribal organizations, private entities, faith-based organizations, businesses, or organizations that promote business involvement, and/or community-based organizations to leverage existing service delivery (i.e., cooperative agreement among providers to pool resources to pay for shared fixed costs and operation) to leverage existing child care and early education service delivery systems and to increase the supply and quality of child care services for children younger than age 13. 8.4.1 Lead Agency public-private partnerships Identify and describe any public-private partnerships encouraged by the Lead Agency to leverage public and private resources to further the goals of CCDF: In service of improving program quality, EEC has been engaged in a public-private partnership with a venture philanthropic organization called New Profit since 2019 to jointly fund, manage and evaluate a pilot of the professional development services through the Early Childhood Support Organization (ECSO) initiative. New Profit has committed approximately $8 million of funding to date, providing unrestricted funding to ECSO organizations in the initial scale up of the initiative, providing staff to coordinate the implementation of the initiative in partnership with EEC staff, and to fund an implementation and impact evaluation of the initiative. EEC’s funding of the initiative increased each year and now fully funds the operational costs of the initiative. As the pilot phase of this initiative concludes in spring 2024, EEC plans to continue to fund the ECSOs and partner with New Profit to provide funding for the evaluation activities.