The Ounce of Prevention Fund aims to give children in poverty the best chance for success in school and in life by advocating for and providing the highest quality care and education from birth to age five. For more than 30 years, the Ounce has made a significant impact on hundreds of thousands of children and families and the communities in which they live. With a focus on the children that are most vulnerable and least served, the Ounce works for a future where every child in the U. S. has the chance to thrive. With five and a half million young children currently living in poverty in America, we work tirelessly to ensure that all children and families receive the highest quality services and supports during the most formative years of development from birth to age five. Research tells us that these years of rapid brain development are optimal times for learning, and the skills and frameworks built in those first few years of life set the stage for a child's long-term success.

The Ounce runs programs in support of children and families, provides professional development tools and trainings to scale best practices within the field, innovates programs for continuous quality improvement and advocates for public policies that ensure access to quality programs for all children. Our early childhood programs support each aspect of a child’s development, from prenatal to age 5. We have created proven models and spurred improvements to boost program quality across states and at the national level, ensuring that more children have access to the programs best suited for their future success. We explore the latest science about early childhood education and translate those theories to the ‘real world’ of our programs, and we rigorously evaluate our programs to collect information that will help us improve our models. The Ounce shares its findings with policymakers to encourage them to strengthen early childhood programs in their communities.

The Ounce is well positioned to deliver the highest quality scalable professional development solutions and systems-building work for the early learning field. The Ounce has research and innovation teams, state and national policy teams, and sophisticated marketing capacity that allows us to stay on the cutting edge of both content creation and content delivery. We have built networks of partners across the nation that allow us to leverage our resources more effectively and share in the advances our peers pioneer. We work with early childhood leaders, instructors, and advocates across the country, in addition to keeping close relationships with legislatures in the places we serve directly. At the federal level, we have deep, positive relationships through our work at the First Five Years Fund with both major parties and many independents; our “middle way" approach to advocacy helps to ensure that early childhood education and care always get a hearing in the halls of power.

The Ounce engages in long-term analysis of its programs through various research partners, measuring the efficacy of our programs in improving outcomes for children, and measuring our trainings in their effectiveness for professionals participating. The results of these studies can be found on our website and in our annual reports. Starting in 2017, the Ounce will also be conducting regular annual research on market share, program reach, and market penetration in order to formulate the clearest path to expanding our impacts.

The Ounce has established a national platform and program, policy and research networks, based on our decades of fieldwork and service to families in Illinois. With the addition of our policy arm at First Five Years Fund, expansion of our internal capacities in marketing, innovations and development, and a rigorous program of research and ongoing program evaluation, the Ounce is poised to become the premier provider of scalable solutions to advance the quality of early childhood education across the country. The next step for our organization is to take the amazing resources we are piloting here in our home state and with our many regional research partners and bring them to the greater market; it is our goal to make best practices in home visiting, center-based care and education and policy/advocacy available to field leaders and professionals across the nation in the next several years, improving early childhood services and outcomes for millions of children and families.