Neighborhood Villages Receives $2 Million Donation from Philanthropist MacKenzie Scott for Work to Solve Child Care Crisis
Funds awarded to local Boston non-profit will further efforts to create a more equitable, accessible, and high-quality child care system
BOSTON, MA (June 16, 2023) - Neighborhood Villages has received a $2 million donation from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott to further their efforts to create a more equitable, accessible, and high-quality child care system.
The funds were awarded through Scott’s charitable foundation, Yield Giving, through which she has donated over $14 billion to more than 1,600 non-profits across the country. Neighborhood Villages will use this donation as an investment toward realizing the goals laid out in its newly-released 2023 Strategic Plan.
“We are so grateful to MacKenzie Scott and Yield Giving for the foundational investment in the work Neighborhood Villages does each day to solve the greatest challenges facing the child care sector,” said Lauren Kennedy, co-president of Neighborhood Villages. “We’ll be using these funds to help us reach our ambitious goals set out in our 2023 strategic plan and create a child care system in which all families have equitable access to affordable, high-quality early childhood education solutions.”
“We are excited to receive this major donation from MacKenzie Scott and her charitable foundation and look forward to using it as we implement our new strategic plan,” said Sarah Muncey, co-president of Neighborhood Villages. “Our strategic plan lays out a bold vision of what our child care can and should look like – and while it will take hard work to achieve it, we know it’s possible and necessary for the future of our families and children.”
Neighborhood Villages’ mission is to transform our existing, inadequate early childhood education sector into an equitable, accessible high-quality system and to demonstrate that achieving such a system is possible. In pursuit of this mission, the organization collaborates closely with early childhood education providers and families to develop solutions to the greatest challenges they face and provides government with proven blueprints that can be scaled system-wide through adoption into public policy.
In its Strategic Plan, Neighborhood Villages establishes the following organizational priorities for the next three years:
Demonstrate that an equitable, accessible, and high-quality early childhood education delivery system is possible;
Embed equity throughout Neighborhood Villages’ work internally and externally; and
Ensure organizational capacity to achieve sustainability and lasting impact.
Neighborhood Villages’ approach is to partner with philanthropy to innovate and evaluate these solutions and then to achieve sustainability and scale through partnership with government.
This approach has proved highly successful, as demonstrated by the organization’s development of multiple statewide programs that it now operates on behalf of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Neighborhood Villages’ collaborative, interlocking programs are building a stronger early childhood education system in Massachusetts and advancing transformative and sustainable policy change.
To read the full strategic plan, click here.
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About Neighborhood Villages
Neighborhood Villages, founded in 2017 by Lauren Kennedy and Sarah Muncey, is a Boston-based systems-change non-profit that advocates for early education and care policy reform and implements scalable solutions that address the biggest challenges facing providers and the families who rely on them. For more information, visit https://www.neighborhoodvillages.org/our-work.
