Help Me Grow National and Start Early are teaming up to support the National Affiliate Network!

As early childhood system leaders navigate unprecedented change, one thing is clear: the time to lead with resilience, creativity, and clarity is now. That’s why the HMG National Center just launched Adaptive Leadership for Visionary Systems Change to equip HMG leaders with the tools, strategies, and community they need to thrive in uncertain times. 

As part of this initiative, we are excited to partner with Start Early to offer a new resource: Start Early Leadership Advising for HMG – a free, confidential consultation service available to HMG affiliate leads.

Start Early Consulting launched in 2016 to support government leaders and advocates to build high-quality early childhood systems in states and communities across the country. Our focus is in comprehensive early childhood systems-building, and our team’s deep, cross-sector expertise supports leaders to design comprehensive systems that leverage multiple funding streams, align models and policies to meet local program need, and create a seamless continuum of programming for families from birth through kindergarten.

This three-month consultation series will offer:

• Tailored advising tracks for nonprofit and government HMG leaders
• Timely policy and funding insights grounded in the shifting federal landscape
• Collaborative peer discussions to surface and solve real-time challenges

Start Early’s seasoned consultants will host structured, reflective office hour sessions that blend expert briefings with deep listening, peer learning, and group support – creating interactive, problem-solving spaces where attendees bring their own questions and collaborate in real time with peers and facilitators to navigate policy shifts, funding uncertainty, and strategic challenges with clarity and confidence.

Register today – there are only 50 seats for each office hour!

Whether you’re facing funding uncertainty, seeking advocacy strategies, or looking to reimagine what’s possible for your system, we’re here to help.

Together, we’ll move from crisis response to visionary leadership.

Register today – there are only 50 seats for each office hour!

Funding Strategy Office Hours for Government

• June 26, 2025 04:00 PM EDT
• July 31, 2025 02:00 PM EDT
• August 27, 2025 01:00 PM EDT

 Advocacy Strategies Office Hours for Nonprofits

• June 26, 2025 at 2:00 PM EDT
• July 30, 2025 02:00 PM EDT
• August 28, 2025 02:00 PM EDT

Building a strong and adaptable HMG system requires proactive strategies and insightful resources. This section highlights key resources designed to support your adaptability and long-term success.

• A Guide for Building A Sustainable and Resilient Collaboration (Tamarack Institute): An all-encompassing guide meant to broaden thinking around collective impact and factors around sustainability, resiliency, and collaboration. This guide provides definitions, elements to build resiliency and factors that contribute to sustainability. There are testimonials, stories, exercises for deeper thinking and reflection, and resources to create impactful collaborations. 
• Centering Equity in Collective Impact (Stanford Social Innovation Review): This informative guide provides strategies for centering equity in collective impact work. 
• The Water of Systems Change (FSG): This framework offers an actionable model for creating strategies for systems change whilst centering equity. This framework allows for reflection and deep thinking on six conditions that can enable systems change, including the implementation and evaluation of current efforts. 
• The Crucial Role of Emergence in Systems Thinking (Systems Thinking Alliance): An article focusing on the concept of emergent properties in system change thinking, providing insight into structures and patterns during internal organizational processes. 
• Leading for Equity Framework (National Equity Project): Provides a framework to integrate equity into leadership practices. 
• Eco-Cycle Mapping Tool (Tamarack Institute): A four-phase community change tool that provides a reflective and intentional process for sustainable and collaborative efforts to long-term planning and progress analysis. 
• Accountability Matrix Planning Canvas (Tamarack Institute): A planning tool that helps groups identify collaborative structures and define the roles and responsibilities of partners. 
• Sustainability Self-Assessment (Tamarack Institute): This iterative tool can be utilized at different stages of collaboration. This tool introduces 10 factors to engaging partners in building sustainable collaborative efforts. 
• Key Milestone Report (Tamarack Institute): This is a tool to use with partners to ensure understanding of individual responsibilities that contribute to impactful collective results. This is a living document with the goal to revisit within collaborative partnerships to regularly revisit what the decisions and progress currently look like and how to maximize engagement and collective efforts. 
• Strategy Triage Tool (Strategy Lift): The Strategy Triage Tool is a system-level resource to help leaders, teams, and organizations quickly assess and prioritize their work during times of significant change or disruption. This tool offers a steadying process to create the space needed to think, adapt, and move forward. 
• Water of Systems Change Learning Exercise (FSG): Based on the “inverted triangle” framework presented in The Water of Systems Change, this activity is designed to help individuals think systemically about social change, explore what is happening below the surface on issues they care about, and determine how they and their organizations can pursue change in a disciplined and holistic manner.
• Responding to Threats and Challenges Planning Tool (Collective Impact Forum): This tool is used to support collaborative teams to better align their core commitments during a changing political landscape. 
• Resilient Leadership Survey (Deveraux Center for Resilient Children): a reflective survey process for leaders to determine if they have resiliency behaviors integrated into their team structures. 

Effectively conveying the importance of strong early childhood systems requires nuanced communication strategies. Explore these guides for insights and best practices in crafting impactful messages for diverse audiences and policymakers.

• Advancing Prenatal-to-Three Policies: A Guide to Finding Commonalities and Solutions with Decision-Makers – NCIT – The National Collaborative for Infants & Toddlers This messaging guide from Voices for Healthy Kids on how to work with conservative legislators applies to any messaging around PN-3 issues within conservative contexts.

• As part of its Civic Language Perceptions Project, the Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE) produced the How To Talk Bridgey report. PACE’s national survey found that words like “community” and “service” had high net positivity across all groups, while words like “social justice” and “racial equity” were most perceived to drive people apart.
• The Rippel Foundation and TheCaseMade created a playbook for making the case for the “vital conditions” that allow all Americans to thrive.
• Building Momentum: A Messaging Guide for the Earliest Years | Think Babies™ To make the best and most urgent case for the policies that support babies and their families, the National Collaborative for Infants and Toddlers partnered with Think Babies to develop a guide based on messaging research with policy influencers across the country and on both sides of the aisle. These resources are full of messaging and communications tips that can help baby advocates build support and spark action among policymakers.
• Healthy Places by Design and the Narratives for Health Initiative co-produced a set of Transformative Narratives for Socially Connected Communities.
• Berkeley Media Studies Group Championing public health amid legal and legislative threats: Framing and language recommendations. This resource offers five tips for making the case for public health. Although there is no single message that will be effective for all audiences in all situations, the recommendations offer language to illuminate and uplift the role of public health as a public good.
• What Does Caring Mean? A New Framing Strategy to Shift Thinking about Kids and Families: A new strategy to center children and families in collective decision making; this framework provides introductions to cultural mind shifts to caregiving that is collective, inclusive and expansive of all children and families well-being. 
• Starting From a Place of Strength: United Ways Using Data and Messaging to Tell an Impact Story: This collaborative webinar focused on moving towards a collective approach when advocating for children. This session focused on leveraging data to champion advocacy efforts, inform policies and build community support for the investment of families and children. 

Strengthening your HMG system’s capacity and identifying diverse funding streams are crucial for long-term impact. This section includes timely information and relevant tools to support your growth and sustainability efforts.

• HMG National Funding and Capacity Building Bulletin: We are regularly updating this section of our website with upcoming events relevant to tracking the national landscape and deadline-driven funding opportunities relevant for HMG affiliates.
• Additional funding resources include:
  • Public Financing in Times of Uncertainty – Children’s Funding Project
  • Federal Funding Streams for Children and Youth Services – Children’s Funding Project: This database catalogs the purposes and key characteristics of 320 federal funding streams that support cradle-to-career initiatives.

Staying informed about policy changes and the evolving landscape is paramount for effective advocacy and planning. This section provides resources to help you track key legislative developments and emerging trends impacting the early childhood system-building field.

Email Newsletters

• PN-3 Policy Impact Center Legislative Trends
  • Legislative Trends has the latest updates on state policy action affecting infants, toddlers, and their families during legislative sessions. Each week, a team of policy analysts tracks key legislative movements, from state budget proposals impacting Medicaid and SNAP to bills advancing paid family leave, childcare, and other critical prenatal-to-3 policies. 
    Email Signup – Prenatal-to-3 Policy Impact Center
• NCIT Right of Center weekly newsletter
  • Civitas Public Affairs Group generates this curation of weekly news items of interest for National Collaborative for Infants & Toddlers (NCIT) members, prenatal to three (PN-3) advocates, center-right elected officials and decision-makers, and communities across the country.
    https:/ncit.org/resources/right_of_center_updates/
• ZTT The Baby Monitor
  • Learn more about the issues that impact a baby’s strong, healthy development, access the latest resources from ZERO TO THREE in federal, state and local policy, and stay up to date on policy and advocacy news through ZTT’s bimonthly e-newsletter.
    Connect | ZERO TO THREE
• AMCHP Policy Alerts
  • Policy Alerts deliver sensitive announcements and timely information on issues spanning Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Judiciary Branch that affect maternal and child health (MCH). These updates include key legislative and regulatory developments, as well as AMCHP’s advocacy efforts to support essential MCH programs. The goal: to ensure you are informed and equipped to engage in the ever-evolving policy landscape that impacts MCH.
    Subscribe – AMCHP

Additional Resources

• Join the National Collaborative for Infants and Toddlers (NCIT)
  • Becoming a formal member aligns your organization with the hundreds of other members working on prenatal-to-three issues at the local, state, federal and tribal levels. Members can also access specialized tools, resources and support needed to support the change we want to see in our communities. Supports such as an online grassroots action center, advocacy and issue trainings, and campaign consultation and one-on-one technical assistance from planning through every phase of a campaign.
    www.ncit.org/membership 
• Manatt Health maintains this Federal Policy Tracker as a centralized source to document all recent Federal policy coming out of the Trump Administration with health policy relevance. This tracker includes a brief description of the relevant Federal policy document, associated litigation, links to source materials and related Manatt Health resources. Content can be filtered by date, agency, and topic area. Manatt is currently making daily updates to this tracker. 
  Manatt Health Federal Policy Tracker_PUBLIC.xlsx
• View the ZERO TO THREE table tracking past and proposed federal funding levels for key federal early childhood programs in three buckets: good health, strong families, and positive early learning experiences.

Connect with HMG National directly for expert through our technical assistance (TA) offerings. We provide various avenues for tailored support, networking, and collaborative learning to strengthen your HMG system.

• Benefit TA Hours: Each affiliate state across the Network is offered benefit TA hours as part of affiliation. These hours are yours and can be used to connect with HMG National staff on topics of your choice. Single-system states receive two benefit TA hours per year, while multi-system states get four. Fill out this intake form to schedule a TA session and let us know how we can shape the conversation to best meet the needs of your system and the families you serve. 
  NOTE: If you are from a local system in a multi-system state, please reach out to your state lead before scheduling for benefit TA hours.
• HMG Affiliate Connection Cafés: These monthly, 1-hour networking sessions will be a valuable opportunity to connect with other HMG affiliates to discuss what matters most to you in the moment. Join us to share what’s top of mind, exchange insights, and dialogue with peers who understand your experience. 

• *COMING SOON* Affiliate Connections Directory: Our brand-new, forthcoming HMG Affiliate Connections Directory will provide a filterable web-based platform designed to help affiliates easily find and connect with one another around the topics they find most valuable to discuss together. This Directory will allow users to easily search and contact other affiliates based on their roles, states, systems, HMG implementation activities, and more. 
• HMG National Forum 2025: As policies evolve and uncertainties arise, our collective capacity to adapt, innovate, and support young children and families becomes more critical than ever. This is precisely why the theme of HMG National Forum 2025, Weathering Any Storm: Building Resilient Early Childhood Systems, is so profoundly relevant right now. We invite you to join us in Hartford, Connecticut this summer for the opportunity to connect with leaders, practitioners, and advocates from across the HMG Network and the broader early childhood field, all coming together to address the challenges and opportunities of this moment. Register for the Forum!