Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Education Division – Early Learning Program
Washington State Promising Community Models RFP
Request for Proposals (RFP)
BACKGROUND 1
PROCESS AND TIMELINE 3
WHAT WE WILL FUND 3
INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION 4
GRANT APPLICATION PART 1: ORGANIZATION INFORMATION 5
GRANT APPLICATION PART 2: PROJECT INFORMATION 7
BACKGROUND
Bill and Melinda Gates believe that all lives hold equal value and their foundation is focused on creating greater equity and opportunity in health and learning. As part of its Education program, the foundation has launched a new strategy to improve quality early learning with the goal of ensuring that all kids have the opportunity to be prepared for success in school and in life.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will invest up to $90 million over the next 10 years in a coordinated effort with private and public partners, to provide high quality early learning opportunities to all children and their caregivers in Washington state. Our strategy is to reach children where they spend the majority of their day—either at home with a parent or guardian or in a licensed child care facility—using primarily existing infrastructure. Our objective is to ensure that all children have access to high quality early learning environments by providing support to parents, and by transforming childcare from the current predominately low-quality custodial care to effective, high-quality centers that will prepare children socially, emotionally and cognitively by age 5 to succeed in school and in life. Our goal is that this action will significantly increase the number of children that arrive at school prepared for academic and life success. Our statewide strategy has three main components:
§ Targeted Demonstration Communities: a comprehensive initiative in two communities to ensure that all children and families within these selected communities have access to high-quality early learning to demonstrate how these supports can make a profound difference.
§ Promising Models: support innovative local efforts on a smaller scale to improve early learning for children throughout Washington state. This could entail validating local projects, expanding local efforts across the community or replicating successful local projects statewide. These grants might also bolster capacity to bring local supportive services for families to scale. This grant making area is the focus this RFP.
§ Statewide Efforts: support, promote, and encourage statewide efforts to improve early learning across the state. An important example of this is our grant to Thrive by Five: The Washington Early Learning Fund. Thrive by Five is a public-private partnership dedicated to coordinating business, philanthropic and government investments designed to assist parents and families in their primary duty to prepare children for success in school and life. In addition to Thrive by Five, these statewide efforts include programmatic initiatives, infrastructure investments, education, and advocacy efforts as well as other strategic opportunities for statewide early learning improvements.
A key component of our early learning strategy is to work in communities across the state of Washington to support the expansion, replication, and evaluation of existing community-based models for early learning. These Promising Models grants will support new and innovative programs that have the ability to support parents and provide high-quality opportunities for children with the goal of increasing rates of school readiness for all children. We expect that Promising Model communities will help build knowledge about what works for children and families; replicate and bring to scale effective programs; and broaden acceptance and buy-in about early learning across the state.
The foundation will be proactive in working with communities, institutions, public agencies, and nonprofits that are focused on the following:
· Community Collaboration. Supporting community-level collaborative efforts focused on creating high-quality early learning for young children and their families.
· Replication. Expanding, or taking to scale, proven models that are known to improve outcomes for families and young children.
· Evaluation: researching, testing, and evaluating existing models to learn about their long-term outcomes.
· Innovative approaches. Designing, testing, or researching early learning models that will inform and advance early learning in Washington.
Several principles guide our work in early learning:
1. Help all Washington’s families prepare every young child from birth to five for success in school and life, using mixed income models, yet targeting resources to low-income and high-risk families and children who can benefit most;
2. Support and engage parents as a child’s first and most important teacher;
3. Promote optimal development of the whole child including their social, emotional intellectual and physical development in the context of family, community, culture and language;
4. Promote a range of parent education, family support, early care and education, preschool, and intervention services, complementing and building on existing capacity and improving our knowledge of what works;
5. Foster a culture of accountability that makes it safe to conduct honest evaluation in the service of continuous quality improvement; and
6. Tightly integrate programs and policies so that our programs inform and demonstrate effective policies, and our policies support implementation and scaling up of needed services, and improved coordination and linkages between early learning services and between early learning and K-12 education.
7. Build a skilled and sustainable early childhood workforce since the essence of quality services is embodied in the knowledge, skills, and relationship-building capacities of early childhood teachers and providers.
8. Ensure coordination of local action and promote participation of all community partners.
Communities and/or organizations that are invited to apply for a Promising Models grant are expected to engage leaders from across the community in the application process including: School District(s), Department of Early Learning staff, Educational Service Districts, Hospital(s), Head Start & ECEAP provider(s), Elected Official(s), County Health Department, Resource and Referral Agency, business and philanthropic representatives, community organizations, community members (including parents), and other stakeholders. In cases where a collaborative community effort has been invited to apply for funding, the foundation expects that the community will select a lead agency to lead and coordinate a collaborative community effort.
While the foundation expects to be a major funder, we see this effort being co-funded with other private and public funders. This may include the Department of Early Learning, other local, regional or national foundations, or Thrive by Five Washington, a newly formed public-private partnership for early learning. Thrive by Five has adopted the development of Promising Models as an area of focus, and will be committing resources to their development. In addition, there is an expectation that local communities will bring existing resources to the table as well as raise new resources for this effort.
PROCESS AND TIMELINE
The responses to this grant application will be used to better understand the infrastructure, partnerships, and leadership that exist to support increasing quality early learning in that particular community. In addition, it will be used to assess the ability of the applying organization(s) to lead, coordinate, develop, and implement the work.
Responses will be reviewed using the criteria stated below:
· Commitment to a set of goals for school readiness and agreement to be measured against these goals.
· Commitment of the school district to the goal of closing the school readiness gap and ensuring that all families have access to affordable, high-quality early learning for children birth to five years of age.
· Active engagement and strong involvement of key community leaders to providing high-quality early learning opportunities. This includes support and collaboration from the K-12 school district, local government, the business community, parents, community and faith-based leaders, as well as the early learning community.
· Demonstrated knowledge and capacity of early learning providers, community colleges and institutions that can provide education and training in support of high-quality early learning.
· Ability to create a sound plan of action to work toward measurable results.
· Willingness and ability to work as part of a collaborative early learning coalition, flexibility to change current processes and systems to coordinate efforts and maximize impact, and willingness to rigorously assess efforts.
WHAT WE WILL FUND
As with all of our grant making, our goal is to stimulate and support partnerships with other funders in every sector. In addition, we recognize that there are multiple potential areas for investments for young children and their families, and that children and families need to have many different supports in place. This includes a wide range of programs, classes, and services, including: professional development; curriculum development; physical improvements; pre- and post-natal support programs; home-based literacy programs; parent support programs; child development classes; information and referral resources; case management; and community education classes. For the purpose of this grant proposal, communities will be expected to prioritize the area of greatest need, potential, and promise of results within the community.
Recipients of our promising models grants in early learning will be aligned with school readiness benchmarks for early learning and development, as well as Kindergarten readiness assessments as appropriate. The state of Washington currently does not have a standard benchmark or set of assessment tools. We will consider other proven assessment tools and indicators as acceptable measurements during this transitional period. Assessments should include physical well-being, health, and motor development; social and emotional development; approaches toward learning; cognition and general knowledge; and language, communication, and literacy. Eligible programs may be focused on children in licensed care or children at home with a parent or other caregiver.
Requests for funding for improvements to childcare must be committed to meeting our five standards of quality: 1) highly trained and adequately compensated teachers; 2) strong, research-driven curriculum emphasizing emotional, social, cognitive, and physical development; 3) research-based education and programs for parents, along with parental involvement in care; 4) low child: teacher ratios; and 5) appropriate physical space.
Funding may be requested for multiple years and grants are typically not longer than three years in length. Funding availability and structure will be reviewed on a case by case basis. However, the foundation generally does not fund an entire project preferring to be one of multiple funding sources and the funding amountas a percent of the total project shoulddecrease annually. For example, a grant may coverhalfof the project’s total budget for the first year,and then decrease in years two and three. In addition, applicants are required to have a significant local match, including in-kind support.
Funding may also be available fromother public and private sources, including Thrive by Five: the Washington Early Learning Fund and the Department of Early Learning. Likewise, our foundation’s promising models program also will consider grant requests in which our commitment would fulfill a matching requirement from Thrive and/or one of its partners.
INSTRUCTIONS FOR SUBMISSION
Please respond to the Request for Proposal within 30 days of invitation. Extensions are available at written request. The application should be signed by the Executive Director or equivalent and the Chair of the Board. If the project is a community collaboration, letters of support are requested from participating organizations. Submit one signed hardcopy of the proposal and email an electronic copy to:
Jodi Haavig, Program Officer
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
1551 Eastlake Avenue East
Seattle, WA 98102
For questions, please contact Jodi Haavig at (206) 709-3630 or .
GRANT APPLICATION PART 1:
Proposal Narrative: Your proposal narrative should address the components listed below. The narrative (excluding the one page executive summary) should not exceed 20 pages (plus appendices), using 12-point font, one-inch margins, single line spacing. We are looking for succinct information. Please date your proposal.
The purpose of this section of the application is to provide information on the legal entity that is applying for funding. If this project is a community collaboration, the information should reflect the lead organization.
Proposal Budget: In addition to submitting a written narrative, you are required to submit a proposed budget using the foundation’s budget template. If a proposal is approved, grantees will be expected to report actual expenses against the approved budget as part of required progress reporting for the duration of the grant period.
Please direct any questions about the submission process or guidelines to your contact at the foundation.
I. Executive Summary
Include a brief, high-level summary of the proposal to give outside readers an overview of the proposal contents. Please limit to one page.
II. Project Description
A. Need Statement
Include a well-documented, compelling description of the problem or need(s) that the proposed project aims to address. To the extent applicable, also include the geographic areas this project will serve and why these areas were selected.
Tell us what you know about the school readiness rate in your community and gaps that exist among groups of children. Where do children B-5 in your community spend their time? How many children use licensed child care? How many are with family, friends and neighbors? How many are at home with a parent or primary caregiver, etc.?
Describe the group or community to be served by your project, and the need for this project in that community. Describe that group or community’s input into the design of your project.
B. Goal(s) and Objectives
1. Describe the goal(s) and overarching objectives of the proposed project. How many people will be served?
2. Describe how the proposed activities support the foundation’s larger goal of ensuring that all kids are school ready.
C. Project Implementation Plan
1. Describe how the proposed project will be implemented.
2. Describe any project partners on which project success is dependent. If success of the project is dependent on the support of partner organizations, include letters of support from those partners or the agreement governing the partnership.
D. Project Timeline
The project timeline should be consistent with all components of the proposal. Concisely list the key project milestones and target completion dates. Order milestones in chronological order from start to finish.
Activity/Milestone/Deliverable / Target DateActivity/Milestone A / xx/xx/xxxx
Activity/Milestone B / xx/xx/xxxx
Activity/Milestone C / xx/xx/xxxx
E. Evaluation Plan
To the extent your organization intends to evaluate this project (independent of Gates funding), please describe your plans for conducting the evaluation (third party or in-house) and reporting on its findings (e.g. dissemination plans, etc.).
F. Key Partners