Philanthropy: Where to Find $56 Million?

Lucia Campriello had no connection to Vermont until her husband’s job changed and they moved their young family to the state. She started working in development at an arts nonprofit in Burlington and found herself struggling with an issue familiar to most parents of young children—finding child care. 

“I had a three-year-old and a four-month-old,” she said. “I was trying to do what every parent does at that age.” 

In the summer of 2017, Campriello saw an advertisement for a chief development officer for Let’s Grow Kids. “It was the first professional fundraiser on the team, which signaled to me it was a ‘build it’ role.” She wasn’t sure she had the relevant experience, but she felt “drawn to the mission” and applied. 

She connected with Janet McLaughlin, the executive director of Vermont Birth to Five, who explained how Rick Davis and Let’s Grow Kids had recently brought the programmatic work into a single organization. They were now embarking on an effort to bring high-quality, affordable child care to the state. Campriello and McLaughlin had children in the same child care center. They pushed their strollers together while having this conversation, both keenly aware of how much reliable child care impacted their own ability to go to work each day. 

Campriello was hooked. Several interviews later, she came in to meet with Aly Richards for one of the final rounds. Richards handed her a napkin with numbers scrawled on it. “It said we would need $56 million for a 10-year campaign,” Campriello recalled with disbelief. “I thought she was crazy. Where would we find that?” 

But as soon as they began fundraising work in earnest, the “crazy” idea became attainable. The $56 million goal became $60 million, and then $70 million. By the time Let’s Grow Kids sunset in 2025, it had raised over $73 million. 

Campriello’s one regret? “I wish I’d kept that napkin.”

Before Campriello came on board in 2017, the organization had largely relied on the pluck and energy of Davis to fundraise. Davis had cultivated a dozen loyal donors, and he had raised the seed money from the Stillers. On occasion, Let’s Grow Kids would bring in fundraising consultants to support solicitation work and engage new major donors, but they had no formal development team. At this point, they still weren’t sure what that would even look like. 

In 2018, Let’s Grow Kids commissioned a yearlong planning study with two local Vermont fundraising consultants: Tere Gade and Scott McArdle. The goal was to lay groundwork for what their fundraising prospects looked like within the state. It was Gade and McArdle who had come up with the $56 million number and helped Let’s Grow Kids envision what sort of fundraising team they wanted to build, including drafting the job description and helping to hire Campriello.²³

They also worked with Let’s Grow Kids to draft a case for support: a document that could be shared with potential donors with persuasive, motivating language and tell the story of what Let’s Grow Kids wanted to do. It laid out the goals for the Let’s Grow Kids’ campaign: defining the mission as “ensur[ing] affordable access to high-quality child care for all Vermont families by 2025,” and the vision that “Vermont is the BEST place to raise a family.”

It also formalized the plan that Let’s Grow Kids would, win or lose, sunset by 2025. And that the campaign would need to raise an additional $37 million above their initial multiyear fundraising commitments to hit their $56 million goal. 

“It was the first time we consolidated the complex message of Let’s Grow Kids into the most basic points with the head and the heart,” said Richards. 

Gade and McArdle then conducted interviews with Let’s Grow Kids’ closest fundraising partners, seeking feedback on the case for support and delving into the philanthropic landscape in Vermont writ large. Among the things Let’s Grow Kids wanted to learn: How did donors feel about supporting child care, would they respond to the 10-year timeline, and did they have a compelling case for seeking national support?

The planning study found the following: First, child care as an issue resonated widely. Donors in Vermont cared about this as an issue impacting the state and could be persuaded that an investment in child care was a worthwhile return on their investment. Second, the 10-year timeline was appealing to donors, who would be interested in making a time-limited contribution without having to donate in perpetuity. Third, there existed a pool of high-net-worth individuals connected to Vermont who cared about the outcome of children in the state. 

With all of the feedback, Let’s Grow Kids worked with Gade and McArdle to create a stylized fundraising pitch deck. “It was the first time we had that,” said Richards. Davis had been having fundraising conversations for almost two decades, but it wasn’t until 2018 that they had a streamlined, mission-focused pitch. 

They had a new point person for development, a clean and concise case for support, a wide network of early childhood providers and advocates, and several small legislative wins. 

They were ready to swing big and start hunting for the $56 million they would need. 

Since its inception in 2000, the Permanent Fund for Vermont’s Children had largely been a grantmaker, offering funds to child care providers across the state to help them achieve better quality. By 2018, the Permanent Fund was still doing that work, but now it lived under the umbrella of Let’s Grow Kids. It was a pivot, Campriello knew, to go from being the organization that gave money to providers to becoming an organization actively seeking funds from donors. 

In early 2019, Hannah Burnett joined the fundraising team. Burnett had worked in national grantmaking for global health groups, and the team needed to attract national donors. But the national organizations weren’t ready to take a chance on what was then an unknown group, and Burnett found herself explaining to prospective donors and supporters that the programmatic work of Let’s Grow Kids was what set it apart from other advocacy campaigns. The programmatic work could show progress; the organizations within Let’s Grow Kids had over a decade of working with early childhood educators as part of the Permanent Fund for Vermont’s Children. They could show success on their ability to improve the quality metrics for providers in the state. And the work to improve quality statewide was what made it possible, in a matter of years, for the legislature and supporters to envision a state-funded system. “This direct service also built relationships and trust among the child care and early childhood education community so that they became the base of Let’s Grow Kids’ child care campaign supporters,” said Erin Roche, who worked on the program team. “We couldn’t have gotten even the unfunded early wins without them.”

“A lot of our funders started regionally,” said Burnett. A funder might want to strengthen the early childhood programs in a particular section of the state, and then “they could see the impact of that work,” she said. Building on that success, the fundraising team would shift their ask to unrestricted giving, the kind of money that Let’s Grow Kids could use for any purposes. 

The local funders, Burnett explained, actually saw the evidence in their programming work success and became convinced that the Let’s Grow Kids work would result in systems change. “They had a lot of trust in us,” she said. “You can’t do transformational philanthropy without trust on the local levels. National funders just don’t have the same relationship.”

Let’s Grow Kids began shifting the way it viewed philanthropy. “Less transactional,” said Burnett. The team needed donors to be bought into the idea of systems change, which can be harder to understand than direct services. For instance, a funder might be willing to donate to help a child care provider meet a one-time shortfall, since they can see how readily their dollars are being put to use. It’s different to ask a funder to donate to a 10-year campaign to change policy. Riskier, too, explained Burnett, because “what if this policy never passes and you keep doing the same thing over and over again?” 

Tere Gade, who’d led the fundraising study for Let’s Grow Kids, explained that part of her work was changing the perspective on philanthropy within the organization by articulating the vision of what the organization intended to do and how much it would cost to do so.²⁴ “The donors are not transactions,” Gade said. “When you are asking people to invest in your dreams, you have to show what the dreams are, including the ones you have pursued in the past that have been successful. Past behavior predicts future performance. You can use the past behavior to show that.” 

Let’s Grow Kids would need deep relationships with long-standing business groups to develop allies and—more importantly—to get buy-in to what the work of systems change would entail. The Vermont Business Roundtable, a nonprofit public interest group of business leaders in the state, had taken a particular interest in the education of very young children, dating back to the year 2000 when they created the initiative Born to Read, an early literacy promotion effort that (1) gave every baby born in the state a kit with books and learning materials, and (2) conducted public information and media campaigns to emphasize the importance of reading to young children. In 2003, the national Business Roundtable published a report on the return on investment in spending for young children, followed by policy briefs. Davis had connected with the Vermont chapter in 2007, forming a strong working relationship with the executive director, Lisa Ventriss; Richards and team continued to pursue a strong partnership with the group. 

“The beauty of fundraising is that it’s all relationships,” Richards said. In addition to raising funds, “we were raising volunteers and ambassadors and getting feedback, and also getting amalgamation with the business community as well.” The business community would later prove to be one of their most stalwart allies in advancing their goals for child care infrastructure.

“By the end we had sophisticated funders,” said Burnett. “They knew that systems change was going to get the return on investment.”

Though the early years of Let’s Grow Kids’ fundraising success focused on individuals connected to Vermont, in 2018 they got their first bite of national interest. Campriello and Richards flew to Chicago to meet with the Ounce of Prevention Fund (now Start Early), as well as the Pritzker Children’s Initiative and Irving Harris Foundation, both of which were members of the Early Childhood Funders Collaborative (ECFC). Let’s Grow Kids was then invited to join the Collaborative; ECFC prided itself on having projects across all states, and at the time they didn’t have a presence in Vermont. 

From the Collaborative, they were able to connect with the Alliance for Early Success, led by Lisa Klein, who would later become a pivotal connection for them when Let’s Grow Kids became interested in flexing political muscle to advance legislative work. At the time, the Alliance didn’t invest in political work that would sway legislators, but Klein was interested in making that shift. Over the next few years she kept tabs on the work Let’s Grow Kids was trying to do. In 2021, she came to Vermont and spent a day on Stave Island in Lake Champlain, where Let’s Grow Kids conducted its annual retreat with leadership and advisors, and became a significant investor in their political efforts. 

But at this early stage, the Alliance gave Let’s Grow Kids a modest annual gift of $25,000. It was enough that Campriello knew they could tell Vermont’s philanthropic community that Let’s Grow Kids was being taken seriously on a national level, but it was nowhere close to what they would need to run a 10-year campaign. The major fundraising push would have to take place in Vermont. 

From the beginning, the legislative team had a goal of producing a tangible win each legislative session. It would help engage the philanthropic community, they knew, and also build a wider tent of child care champions. “Success breeds commitment and is a stepping stone to doing more,” said Adam Necrason, one of the hired lobbyists. 

In the summer of 2018, the legislative team knew they needed to identify their child care champions, the group they could call on to advance more sophisticated child care legislation. They’d won the Blue Ribbon Commission, largely on the basis of Rebecca Ramos’s connections, and they knew they would need deeper commitments to advance something more ambitious. They invited four Democratic state representatives to a meeting at the Let’s Grow Kids’ Burlington Office in the hope of creating a “legislative brain trust.”  The group included Rep. Ann Pugh, chair of the House Committee on Human Services, and Reps. Jessica Brumsted and Theresa Wood, members of the committee; Reps. Diane Lanpher and David Yacovone, both members of the House Committee on Appropriations; and Rep. Kathryn (“Kate”) Webb, the ranking member of the House Committee on Education. The group gathered around a conference table, eating cookies from the bakery next door and fiddling with LEGO pieces left behind from children’s visits, as they discussed next legislative steps.

“We said, ‘We know that you are child care champions and we would love to work with you,’” Kenney recalled. Let’s Grow Kids wanted their next legislative win to be something more substantial than a study, but they felt that the legislature might not be ready to tackle the full child care infrastructure needs given the hefty price tag connected to it.

“We asked, ‘What are your ideas on how to solve this problem?’ And we hatched a plan on how to introduce a bill in January and try to make some much bigger steps than they had before.”

Kenney recalled her nervousness at this meeting. This was the first time Let’s Grow Kids had formally invited legislators in to be part of the strategic process, and they’d only targeted Democrats because they hadn’t yet built a bipartisan coalition—that would come later. 

“It was risky,” Kenney said. “Whenever you pull in legislators to have a candid conversation you risk them being, like, ‘it’s a terrible strategy,’ or having a different idea that you know is a bad one. You want to bring in the people that you think are going to be most likely to work together and most committed to the issue and the most likely to listen to the voices that you are bringing to the table as well.”

In 2019, the legislative brain trust introduced multiple bills to take bigger steps to stabilize and improve Vermont’s child care system, aspects of which were included in the 2019 budget bill. 

“Something felt feasible then,” Kenney said. “It wasn’t ‘we are going to do huge things,’ but it felt like a turning point.” 

The provisions that passed included higher reimbursement levels paid to child care providers through the state’s Child Care Financial Assistance Program (CCFAP). Vermont, like most states, relies on CCFAP as the primary resource to support families with incomes low enough to qualify for child care assistance.²⁵ At the time, most states paid providers at the “market rate” for service, which is the price charged to families. For most child care providers, the market rate of what they charge families isn’t enough money to cover the true cost of care; many providers, particularly those in lower-income communities, run their child care programs at a slim profit margin or a deficit. 

In addition to raising the amount of money providers receive for caring for children, the 2019 budget bill also expanded eligibility for child care subsidies so more families had access to them, and the eligibility cap was raised from 200 percent of the federal poverty level to up to 300 percent.²⁶ This meant that a family of four making close to $80,000 annually could now qualify for child care assistance.²⁷ The legislation also included funds to begin exploring what information technology upgrades would be needed if the child care system was further expanded, a crucial step that would later become pivotal when looking to create a much more comprehensive child care system.

It was a victory for the legislative brain trust and for the broader child care agenda. Child care reimbursement rates and income eligibility levels went up significantly; for some providers, it was the first time in years that the rates had been raised.²⁸ 

The team was on a roll. Or so they thought. 

By early 2020, Let’s Grow Kids had upped the fundraising goal to $10 million for the year. They were beginning to attract more national attention. That February, Burnett and Campriello went to Park City, Utah, for the Winter Innovation Summit (now the Sorenson Impact Summit), where they spoke to social-impact founders and funders interested in making mission-driven investments. The funders were particularly interested in the success Let’s Grow Kids had with child care providers—all of the years of work that Davis had done with his Vermont Community Preschool Collaborative were examples of their success in the field they could build on. “We could show progress with the programmatic work,” said Burnett.

They felt some momentum leaving the summit; there was energy around the work, recalled Burnett, and also the potential for collaboration. They were continuing to shift from being seen as a group focused on programmatic work to one that did advocacy work, and they finally felt they had a foothold for such collaboration. Looking around the Salt Lake City airport, Burnett recalled many people were wearing ski buffs (neck gaiters) and medical masks over their faces, something she hadn’t seen much of before. 

In March 2020, Richards got what she assumed would be Let’s Grow Kids’ first major national fundraising breakthrough. She was invited to the Philanthropy Workshop Global Summit in Napa Valley, California. To prepare for the summit, she met with a storyteller and toy developer; they devised a complex plan to engage national funders with games and toys to illustrate the joy and benefits of play. The success from Utah had been validating. Richards was certain they would finally be taken seriously as a contender for national funds.

The day she was supposed to leave, she had a fever. Still determined, she insisted on going, over the objection of her family. “I didn’t want to give up the opportunity,” she said. 

On the way to the airport, Richards changed her mind. She turned around and went straight home; her fever persisted, and she lost her sense of taste and smell. She was devastated about losing the opportunity to participate in the workshop; she didn’t think much of her illness. It would be weeks before testing for such COVID-19 symptoms was a readily available option. But at that moment, she just knew she’d lost this opportunity and would need to work twice as hard to get another one. 

By mid-March, the state’s pre-K system was back up for discussion in the state legislature. Let’s Grow Kids had believed strongly in a mixed delivery system—a network of child care providers that included traditional centers and schools as well as in-home or family child care—rather than a system that relied exclusively on school districts. On Thursday, March 12, Kenney was at the State House, testifying about why the mixed delivery model was necessary. But there were signs posted all around the capitol that people with fever or coughs should stay home. Like Burnett, she didn’t think much of it at the time. She left her overnight oats in the staff refrigerator and shoes under her desk, intending to return the next day and continue. When she felt ill the following day, she called her team and explained she’d sit this one out. I’ll be back in a few days, she assumed.

Except she wasn’t. The next day, March 13, the legislature voted to suspend the legislative session and close the doors of the State House. A state of emergency was declared. The COVID-19 pandemic threatened to upend all their work and push their fragile child care system to the breaking point. 

“All of that momentum stopped,” Burnett said. 

Like the rest of the world, COVID-19 brought the operations of Let’s Grow Kids to a halt. 

But people still needed child care. Even with a shutdown, people would need to work, and kids would need a place to go. 

They would have to pivot. Again.