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The McCormick Foundation Board of Directors has approved more than $6.3 million over two years in grants to 21 organizations committed to improving early care and education for at-risk children in Illinois. These additional grants signal an expanded focus for the Foundation on building a statewide system of quality early care and education for all Illinois children ages birth to eight.

Increasingly, experts say that the first two years of primary school are vital in ensuring that the benefits of early care and education continue.

A complete list of grants can be found at the Foundation’s website.

“While we recognize that learning is a continuum, we know our current education system is not – it is a series of silos each with its own delivery system, funding stream, governing laws and regulations,” said Sara Slaughter, education program director of the McCormick Foundation. “The Foundation’s expanded focus from birth to age eight will look across these delivery systems to work toward a unified system to ensure continuous, quality education for our youngest learners.”

To date, the McCormick Foundation has invested more than $90 million to address the complexities of early care and education in Illinois. The Foundation supports quality enhancement activities through our three funding priority areas including public policy, public awareness and building quality infrastructure. The continued development of these three areas in a comprehensive approach ensures more children will have access to a quality education.

“Years of research show that early childhood development heavily influences a lifetime of health, education and economic outcomes for individuals,” said David Hiller, president and CEO of the McCormick Foundation. “Our grantee partners are helping provide more children in Illinois with access to high-quality early learning programs that will make a real difference in their lives.”

In line with its new direction, the McCormick Foundation has granted $500,000 to the University of Illinois at Chicago. The two-year grant will document lessons learned in implementing early childhood modules into its existing principal preparation program and help communicate these lessons to other institutions of higher education as programs respond to new state legislation requiring program re-design. The McCormick Foundation will grant $360,000 over a two-year period to Illinois State University. The grant will conduct a best practices study and provide training to strengthen connections between early learning and K-12 leaders. In addition, the University of Chicago received $209,000 to support the communication of Nobel Prize winner and Professor James Heckman’s early care and education research, emphasizing that early investments in education yield a high rate of return. The Foundation also granted $450,000 to the Erikson Institute. The two-year grant funds a study designed to analyze current practices and policies in dual language learners in the Chicago Public Schools preschool programs.