Watson - powerful friends

Early childhood advocates have been in the trenches for decades, fighting for better recognition and more funding for early childhood, and they continue to be the experts on what the system should look like. But as a colleague of mine once said, “Powerless children need powerful friends.” In order to get the dramatic increases in public funding that we want, we need powerful people to use their reputation and their clout to convince policymakers that this is in the best interest of their community, their state, their nation, whatever nation that is.  

So we use business leaders, not as a substitute for the advocacy of the early childhood community, but as a supplement to show that this investment helps everybody. So when we say “unexpected champions,” we mean leaders, powerful people outside the early childhood field who are willing to say that early childhood is an essential part of improving a country’s wellbeing. These can include business leaders, not people in the childcare field, but business leaders from other companies. It can include police officials who are willing to say that early childhood is a wonderful way to reduce crime and violence. It can be athletes, celebrities, doctors, teachers of older children as well. All of these people can say, “Even though we’re not in the field of early childhood, we believe that this is an important investment,” and those statements carry a lot of weight with policymakers, specifically because those people aren’t from the early childhood world.