It is our pleasure to present the Virginia Early Childhood Foundation’s (VECF) 2025 Annual Stakeholder’s Report on progress in FY25. Business executives helped launch VECF in 2005 to serve as a trusted intermediary, incubator of innovation, and steward of accountability for Virginia’s early childhood system. These core commitments remain our priority in driving the systemic structures needed to advance early childhood success and achieve the triple bottom line return of school-ready children, work-ready families, and business-ready communities.

With your support and engagement, VECF has made continued progress in FY25 in key achievements through our public-private partnership:

• VECF founded and guides the Ready Regions network as state/regional structure to advance our vision that every region in the state will ensure opportunities for families with young children to thrive by coordinating quality measurement and ensuring improvement in every publicly-funded early childhood care and education (ECCE) classroom across the state. In FY25 alone, educators in ~11,000 classrooms in ~3,400 ECCE sites received feedback from ~31,000 Classroom Assessment Scoring System (CLASS®) observations, supporting the quality of children’s experiences in every city and county in Virginia.

• We have enhanced the role and influence of Ready Regions through the Virginia Business Roundtable for Early Education (VBREE), an advisory committee to the VECF board of directors. VBREE harnesses private and public sector leadership in every region to grow the supply of quality child care to match parental demand through strategic financing, improved policy, and innovation. VBREE joins our constellation of stakeholders and coalitions asserting “Gotta Have Child Care!"

• VECF launched the Shovel Ready Virginia Task Force in FY25 convening senior business, economic development, higher education, and philanthropic leaders to identify root causes of gaps in child care access and supply and challenges with sustaining a robust early educator workforce. The Task Force’s work culminated in a report of findings and key recommendations for Virginia to address persistent gaps in the Commonwealth’s child care supply. We invite you to explore it here and engage in your community to bring the recommendations to life.

• We completed the Ready Region ECCE Supply/Demand Data Dashboard to support Ready Regions, community stakeholders, and state policymakers to make strategic decisions and target investments. The dashboard provides a comprehensive view of gaps and strengths in ECCE supply and demand for all 133 of Virginia’s localities in all nine Ready Regions. This data asset ensures - for the first time - a complete picture of ECCE supply in one place, providing strengthened data capabilities for leaders working to efficiently and precisely build supply and address families’ needs and preferences. We encourage you to try it out and then share with colleagues who can utilize and benefit from this tremendous resource.

• With general and administrative costs at less than one percent of our annual budget, VECF efficiently stewards public and private funds to both assist the state with problem-solving strategies and on-the-ground connections and to leverage innovations that drive significant return on investment.

With all the progress made, significant work remains to achieve our vision. Our founders ensured that VECF and its partners were built for and continue to be well-positioned to leverage disruption and lead progress in Virginia’s nation-leading ECCE system.

Thank you for your valued partnership in this transformative work.

/s/ Richard Bynum, Chairman
/s/ Kathy Glazer, President