Child care — infrastructure we can’t afford to ignore

👋 As a mom who juggles board meetings and bedtime stories, policy memos and playground runs — like so many working parents — I’ve struggled to balance career and caregiving. And I know how precarious that balance can be without reliable child care.

At the Burke Foundation, we’ve spent years supporting the health of families in their children’s earliest years — piloting and scaling such innovations as Family Connects NJ, HealthySteps, and Centering, reaching thousands of New Jersey families. Our grantees’ accomplishments confirm what decades of research already tell us: Invest early, and the returns — for children, parents, and society — are extraordinary.

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What we learned at the First 1,000 Days Summit ?

👋 For 8 years, the Burke Foundation has worked with community leaders and experts in early child development and maternal-infant health from New Jersey and across the nation. These efforts came together for 2 days last month at our inaugural First 1,000 Days Summit, co-hosted with the New Jersey Academy of American Pediatrics. The time was right to demand more for families.

The Summit started with the interactive Brain Architecture Game designed by Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child. The team exercise showed how even a single strong relationship can help buffer the harmful impact of early adversity. It drove home the point that, without relationships, the foundation for lifelong health and well-being can falter.

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