Causes: Arts & Culture

Mission: To increase child care providers' (home and center) and parents' knowledge of early childhood development to the extent necessary to enable them to promote the health, safety, and development of young children.

Programs: Early childhood connections provides training and support services to adults who care for young children in homes, child care centers, preschools, and head start programs. In 2016 early childhood connections impacted 1047 individual child care providers through training or technical assistance . Early childhood connections provided 494 hours of education trough in person and on line classes from january 1 through december 31,2016.Many participants attended more than one class.

the rapid city starting strong initiative seeks to provide a voluntary, community-based scholarship program to help 3-and 4-year old children in poverty access quality early education in partnership with qualified program providers of the parent's choice. The program received $222,958 in donations in 2016.$167,930 was used in 2016 for scholarships for early education.