Imaginable Futures is a global philanthropic organization that supports organizations and their collaborative efforts to build and strengthen equity in education, enabling all learners to thrive. We believe lasting change is driven by collaboration. That’s why we partner with communities, organizations, and peer funders across Brazil, Kenya, and the United States to disrupt patterns of inequity and catalyze meaningful change for all learners.

In the US, we fund solutions that ensure young children and their parents get the education they need to thrive, renewing the promise of our child care and postsecondary systems as engines for family opportunity. Access to early care and learning sets our youngest learners up for success, while also alleviating the weight of impossible choices facing all parents, including those who want to pursue postsecondary education or work. 

We know that the early years are critical to learning—90% of the human brain develops before age 5—yet, the US invests 28 times less in early care than other developed countries, falling well short of the public investment that families and communities need. Millions of their parents are learners, too: one in five college students who are parents and 12 million more with some college experience but no degree. These learners are driven by dreams for a better future for their families, but are often held back by fragmented systems that fail to recognize their dedication as both caregivers and students.

Our partners lead advocacy, research, and narrative change efforts that connect education to child care and economic mobility. Most importantly, we firmly believe that we cannot achieve the level of systems change that learners need alone. We work alongside other funders and national networks to expand what’s possible, sharing learning, aligning efforts, and deepening our collective impact for families across the US through solutions built together.

What gives me the most energy today is the opportunity to nimbly respond to the current environment on multiple fronts, specifically on child care:

1. Fueling those working tirelessly on behalf of our youngest learners, from grassroots advocates and rapid response researchers to federal lobbyists and litigators.
2. Honing in on opportunities to bolster and elevate innovations at the state level to improve access to child care, especially amid cuts in funding and staffing at the federal level.
3. Working to create the space and capacity necessary for stakeholders to truly reimagine what a radically improved child care system could look like and creating solutions that cut across the silos that fragment families’ lives.

Where I am most proud of our work is when we are able to play a contributing role to significant state-level legislation that has improved the lives of learners. In 2022, we supported the inspiring network of organizers behind  New Mexico’s successful ballot initiative to enshrine funding for early childhood education in the state’s constitution. When I first started at Imaginable Futures, there were no states with any statewide legislation supporting parenting students; today, there are 7 states and counting. In California, we were an early funder of the California Alliance for Student Parent Success, which now serves as a model for other states that recognize the catalytic power in investing in student parent success.

We see our partners as true collaborators—helping to inform our strategy, sharing ideas, and shaping what’s possible together. Their leadership and active engagement are essential to advancing our work in meaningful and lasting ways.  

Millions of parents in the US face impossible trade-offs between raising children and pursuing education or training that could unlock greater economic opportunity for their families. We must bridge the gaps between our systems of work, learning, and care that leave millions of families shut out of pathways to a better future. The biggest challenge for us is not only supporting efforts to break down silos between the systems that shape families’ daily lives, but breaking down issue silos within philanthropy too. 

For families to thrive, we must find a way to work across multiple systems at once, ensuring that children receive safe, nurturing care in the early years and parents have options for gaining new skills and expertise beyond high school. We think part of the solution is to actively and intentionally seek out collaboration with other funders working across the many issues that affect families’ ability to live, grow, and learn together.

We are education funders – each of us on the US team at Imaginable Futures comes to this work with a deep conviction that education can open doors to brighter futures for families – and that everyone should have the opportunity to get the education they need to thrive.

At the same time, we’ve seen many examples of how learners fall through the cracks between systems – from policies for working parents that exclude those pursuing education or training to early care and learning solutions that exclude home-based providers, despite the fact they offer the most common care arrangement for US families.

Economic Opportunity Funders share the same commitment to seeing US families thrive as we do. As we actively seek peer funders with aligned priorities – not just to share financial capital, but to build the social and network capital needed to drive change across systems – being a member of Economic Opportunity Funders helps us forge connections across silos. We believe that by working collectively, we open space for new ideas and perspectives, shared learning, and greater impact.

The rules that have governed decades of policy and practice affecting education and our economy are being rewritten. How can philanthropy rewrite its own rules to better meet the moment – from setting strategy or tracking impact amid rapid change to collaborating with other funders and partners through uncertainty?

The single person who has shaped who I am today is my younger sister, who has epilepsy and lives with special needs. In everyday life, disabled people like my sister are often hyper-visible from a physical standpoint. When it comes to policies and tangible supports to ensure their economic security, however, disabled people suddenly become invisible. My work as a funder today centers on shifting the circumstances and elevating the humanity of anyone like my sister, who experiences both hyper-visibility in a stigmatized way and invisibility when it comes to institutional and systemic actions that ensure one’s well-being.