This practice refers to purposefully leveraging various funding streams to support comprehensive and sustainable early care and education (ECE) initiativesi. This practice allows stakeholders to maximize resources, address funding gaps, and meet the complex needs of children and families ii.
- Blending funds involves pooling resources from multiple funding streams into a single funding pool, which is then used to support a unified set of ECE services or programs. This approach streamlines funding administration, reduces administrative burdens, and promotes integrated service delivery. Examples of blended funding sources may include federal, state, and local government funding, private philanthropy, corporate sponsorships, and community contributions.
- Braiding funds involves coordinating and aligning multiple funding streams to support complementary and coordinated ECE initiatives while maintaining separate funding sources and programmatic requirements. This approach allows stakeholders to preserve the unique characteristics and flexibility of each funding source while ensuring that resources are used strategically to achieve common goals. Braiding funds may involve coordinating funding from federal, state, and local sources, as well as private investments and in-kind contributions.
Examples of Blending and Braiding Funds for ECE:
- Federal Early Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) funds are often blended with state and local funding sources to support a range of ECE services, including childcare subsidies, quality improvement initiatives, and early intervention programsiii.
- Head Start and Early Head Start programs blend federal funding with state and local resources to provide comprehensive early childhood education, health, nutrition, and family support services to low-income children and familiesiv.
- Public-private partnerships often involve blending and braiding funds from government, philanthropic, and private sector sources to support innovative ECE initiatives, such as preschool expansion efforts, quality improvement initiatives, and family engagement programsv.
Resources Required
Blending and braiding funding streams across various sectors and agencies requires three levels of partnership activity: cooperation, coordination and collaborationvi. Leadership to drive stakeholders toward shared goals is key to establishing cooperative relationships and agreements. Expertise in navigating unique program and use-of-funds requirements and capitalizing on alignments, as well as in cross-sector and cross-agency communication, are critical to laying the foundation for deep collaboration to ensure effective funding partnerships are secured, maintained, and grown.
