Reflections on a Promising Summer

By Karen Lien
Head of Programs, Promise Venture Studio

This summer we had the honor of working side by side with twelve outstanding early childhood ventures as part of our Promising Ventures Fellowship.

At Promise, our mission is to catalyze innovation and growth in the early childhood field to improve outcomes for children and families facing the greatest adversity. The Fellowship offered us an opportunity to zoom in on the ambitious innovation work of a group of ventures who share our vision for improving child outcomes.

Each of the fellows set specific goals for improving their impact and increasing their scale during the Fellowship. Promise and our partners at the Center on the Developing Child provided support through regular office hours and Fellows supported each others’ goals through peer group huddles focused on workshopping individual challenges.

Looking back on the Fellowship experience, we want to share our observations and reflect on their implications for innovation work in the early childhood field overall.

Entrepreneurs in the early childhood field are remarkably ambitious and tenacious.

Our Fellows are taking on big challenges that include:

• Increasing access to high quality childcare for disadvantaged families.
• Improving birth outcomes for new babies and moms.
• Empowering all parents with the knowledge and tools they need to build solid foundations for their children’s health, learning, and emotional development.

They are embracing opportunities to learn and innovate by:

• Experimenting with new product and service models amenable to scale, while prioritizing impact outcomes.
• Incorporating technology to extend the reach and effectiveness of their programs.
• Implementing new business models to support sustainable expansion.

Fellows benefited as much from each others’ support as from our individualized coaching.

Even in this small community of 12 ventures, we saw a surprising number of new partnerships formed that combined the strengths of two organizations and led to greater impact on both sides. These partnerships bridged established organizations and startups, nonprofits and for-profits, and ventures with different regional ties.

Companies face common hurdles as they pursue scaled impact.

• Programs with great results but limited reach have to exercise new muscles to figure out the best way to scale to new regions. They must rethink their theories of change and pinpoint their “secret sauce” for delivering outcomes, find effective ways to communicate their new program visions, and develop sustainable funding models to support growth.
• Companies that have primarily served more advantaged populations have to invest in new need-finding research, product adjustments, and strategic partnerships when they prioritize reaching families who face historical and systemic barriers to access.
• Leaders pursuing scaled impact have to work through a series of adaptive challenges, where the problem is not fully defined and the solution is not known, as they lead their internal teams through growth and transition and/or shake up the way things are done in the wider field.

Drawing on this experience, our next steps become clear.

1. Continue partnering closely with organizations pursuing scaled impact, to help accelerate their progress and learn from their experiences.
2. Prioritize opportunities for peer-peer connection and relationship-building within our larger Venture Network.
3. Develop programming and resources that specifically target the common hurdles ventures face on the path to scaled impact.

We invite you to learn more about each of the Promising Fellows.

To our Fellows, we celebrate your progress this summer and the work you do every day to change lives for children and families. We wish you great success!