We are pleased to present the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation’s (VECF) progress as the Commonwealth’s publicprivate partner in building a strategic and sustained focus on early childhood success. In the wake of the pandemic, VECF has convened partners to create hope and deliver on the promise we see in Virginia’s young children, their families, and communities statewide.

Delivering on Our Promises: We’ve worked to achieve powerful alignment of the public and private sectors’ vision for Virginia’s early childhood education system. Ready Regions, our boots-on-the-ground network recently celebrated its one-year mark as essential system connectivity, preserved in Virginia law. Through Ready Regions, VECF and partners are well positioned to ensure that every Virginia region, family, and child has access to high quality early childhood care and education (ECCE) opportunities. Just as we retired the Smart Beginnings brand for Ready Regions to emerge, we’ve concluded Virginia Quality, the state’s former quality measurement and improvement system for ECCE sites, as Ready Regions now support the implementation of the statewide mandatory Virginia Quality Birth to Five system (VQB5). Through VQB5 and implementing a growing Mixed Delivery program, VECF and Ready Regions partner to deliver on the promise of quality in all publicly funded ECCE sites, driving improvement to ensure all children have access to game-changing early learning experiences.

This past year, we have expanded assets rooted in the Ready Regions network to champion the policy and investment decisions needed to achieve our shared vision for a strong and durable ECCE system. Virginia Promise Partnership works at a regional and state level to elevate the voices of parents and providers alongside Family Councils representing each region. The newly launched Virginia Business Roundtable for Early Education (VBREE) is bringing the heft of the business and economic development sectors to advance state investment in a strong ECCE system as essential to workforce and economic success. Each Ready Region is also represented on the new Commission on Early Childhood Care and Education that is charged with providing recommendations and tracking progress for long-term financing of Virginia’s comprehensive birth-to-five ECCE system.

Quantifying ROI: We proudly steward public funds and leverage private funds to assist the state with problem-solving strategies and on-the-ground connections to achieve our collective mission while harnessing private funding and leadership as essential and powerful catalysts for innovation and partnership. VECF and partners earn and leverage resources to yield significant return on investment. In FY23, we secured additional resources to our base appropriation by a ratio of 82 to 1. With overhead at 2% of our annual budget, we intentionally direct resources into communities with innovative strategies that have bolstered access, quality, and accountability in Virginia’s early childhood system. Please visit www.vecf.org to learn more about our efforts in FY23.

This year, VECF sponsored a study to quantify the anticipated return on investment from an additional $309 million in pandemic relief funding toward ECCE in FY23 compared to FY19. With this additional surge of funds, Virginia provided a year of affordable, high-quality child care to 11,151 additional children under age 5 (and 3,939 children ages 5-12) through expansion of Mixed Delivery and Child Care Subsidy services. The Vanderbilt University study team estimated conservatively that the additional $309 million invested in FY23 will drive a return of $364.3 million within one year and generate at least $778 million in combined cost savings and economic benefits across the lifetime of the children under 5 who received ECCE services in FY23.

Both challenges and opportunities are on the horizon. Thanks to your valued interest and support of this transformative work, we will continue to make progress on our promises.

With gratitude,

/s/ Robert Hurt, Chairman

/s/ Kathy Glazer, President