The first five years shape everything. Now, we're reshaping how we invest in them.
How Promise Venture Studio is putting $480K directly into the hands of community-rooted innovators.
Hi there – we’re Promise Venture Studio, a nonprofit venture studio kindling social innovation in the early childhood field so that all children can fulfill their innate promise, no matter their background.
Our work centers on uniting and supporting a network of over 750 nonprofit and for-profit ventures aligned with our mission. These ventures span every stage of development and reach children prenatal to age 5 in the U.S., along with their families and communities who are facing the greatest adversities.
Some highlights of our work include:
Growing the Early Childhood Leaders of Color (EC LOC) Collaborative to over 400 members across 40 states and supporting the annual R.E.S.T. Conference to strengthen BIPOC leadership in early childhood.
Launching the 6th cohort of the Promising Ventures Fellowship, coaching 10 ventures working toward more just and equitable outcomes for children and families.
Accelerating over $25 million in funding to ventures in our network and facilitating hundreds of connections through two Show + Tell events on innovations for equity and preschool assessments reimagined.
As we continued our work to accelerate and connect equity-driven early childhood organizations through our capacity building and community programming, we consistently heard directly from changemakers in our orbit something we had also observed for ourselves: there was a lack of catalytic funding available to proximate innovators at the earliest stages of their venture development journeys. We saw this reflected in our data as well—leaders with deep experience in early childhood and expertise in the communities they hoped to serve were not getting the dollars they needed to drive the impact they envisioned.
We know that the early childhood innovation ecosystem can’t be healthy and thriving if the most promising innovators are frozen out or stalled at the starting line. Many promising social entrepreneurs never get the chance to pilot their ideas, much less grow their operations, build capacity, or demonstrate their full potential for community impact. In turn, the early childhood field misses out on transformative, community-rooted solutions that could meaningfully shift outcomes for young children and families.
This is what we’re working to change.
Enter the Promise Fund —our answer to systemic funding gaps that keep the most impactful innovations from reaching the families who need them most. The Promise Fund uses social entrepreneurship to preserve the best of our early childhood ecosystems while empowering the changemakers we support to point the way toward the abundant future we imagine.
Last year, we built the blueprint to disrupt systemic barriers by placing trust, capital, and support directly in the hands of proximate leaders in early childhood development. After designing and executing our application and nomination system, we reached an exciting milestone last June by selecting the first recipients of the Promise Fund and deploying $480,000 in funding to officially kick off our pilot year.
The Promise Fund launched with two complementary pilot initiatives designed to meet changemakers where they are:
🌟 The Promise Sandbox Award - $20,000 in unrestricted funding alongside cohort support for proximate early childhood leaders with transformative ideas.
🚀 The Early Stage Venture Award - $200,000 in unrestricted funding alongside customized technical support for proximate-led ventures that have already validated field demand.
The result? Six remarkable early childhood leaders are now bringing their community-centered, equity-driven approaches to fruition—and we’re just getting started.
🎈 What We’re Looking Forward To
This pilot year represents Promise trying on new ways to lean into the principles of trust-based philanthropy and community-led change. We’re looking forward to:
Learning alongside our recipients as they navigate growth, challenges, and breakthroughs
Documenting what works (and what doesn’t) in supporting proximate leaders
Building evidence for the power of unrestricted funding combined with responsive support
Creating models that other funders can adopt and adapt
Each venture represents a different approach to the same fundamental question: How do we create early childhood systems that truly serve all families and communities?
⏭️ Coming Up
This is the start of our monthly blog series where we – Promise Fund Award recipients and Promise team members – share emergent learnings, celebrate wins, discuss challenges, and offer an honest look at what it means to try something new in philanthropy. We’ll take you behind the scenes of this pilot year, sharing insights that we hope will be valuable for other funders, partners, practitioners, and anyone who believes in the power of community-led change in early childhood. If you’d like to get in touch with us directly please fill out this form.