Tag: child care

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Designing the future families deserve 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦

👋 “Public policy is the letter we write to our children.” 

U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia spoke those words at the Aspen Forum on Children and Families I attended last month. The occasion was the launch of Ascend at the Aspen Institute’s Forward With Families vision of how policy can better support health, stability, and economic opportunity.

The Senator’s observation is a powerful reminder that the choices we make as a society — what we prioritize, what we fund, the challenges we decide to take on — shape not just what happens today, but the futures of families for generations.

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Meet Burke’s 2025 Community Champions ⭐

👋 Happy Holidays!

The Maasai community of Kenya and Tanzania greet each another by asking, “And how are the children?” It’s a reminder that the well-being of children reflects the well-being of the whole community — and that every decision we make should be measured by its impact on the youngest among us.

That question is at the core of the Burke Foundation’s work: How are New Jersey’s children? And what more can we do for them to be healthy, supported, and able to thrive? Families want the very best for their children, yet too often face financial strain and systemic barriers that limit the availability of care and resources they deserve.

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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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