About Pre-K Now

Mission and History	Staff Bios	Funding Sources
La historia de Pre-K Now	Advisory Board	Jobs

Mission and History

Pre-K Now was created as a part of a major grant-making strategy of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Originally founded in 2002 inside the Education Trust as the Trust for Early Education, Pre-K Now became a separate organization in 2005. It was Pew's original vision to assist national and state leaders and the public to design and implement sound, research-based policies that support voluntary access to high-quality pre-kindergarten for all three- and four-year-old children in this nation.

Since 2002 nearly $9.5 million has been provided to a small set of carefully selected states that are advancing the pre-kindergarten movement. Pre-K Now's vision is a nation in which every child enters kindergarten prepared to succeed.

Our mission is to collaborate with advocates and policymakers to lead a movement for high-quality, voluntary pre-kindergarten for all three and four year olds. The goal of Pre-K Now is to advance high-quality pre-kindergarten programs for all children. We pursue this goal by:

• providing financial and technical assistance to advocates and other leaders in targeted states to create and fund new public pre-kindergarten programs or to improve the quality of and access to existing programs;
• strengthening the capacity and skills of early childhood advocates and state leaders to secure policy changes and funding; and
• waging a targeted campaign to educate and mobilize key sectors of the public and policymakers at the state and national level about the severity of the American school readiness problem and the potential that high-quality pre-kindergarten for all has for addressing the problem and boosting K-12 student achievement for all children.

We gratefully acknowledge past and present funders: The Pew Charitable Trusts, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, McCormick Tribune Foundation, the Foundation for Child Development, RGK Foundation, CityBridge Foundation, PNC Financial Services Group, the Schumann Fund for New Jersey, the Joyce Foundation, and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.