“Seven million children under age five are in home-based child care settings,” explained Natalie Renew, the new director of Home Grown, a recently formed collaborative that will increase access to and quality of home-based child care for one million children. “I am thrilled about this opportunity to recognize, honor and lift up the value of this important segment of the early childhood field.”

I recently had the pleasure of speaking to Natalie about this exciting initiative, a coming together of ten funders committed to doing something significant to improve the life circumstances of the nation’s most vulnerable children. She told me that the funding group—Buffet Early Childhood Fund, Gary Community Investments, Heinz Endowment, Heising-Simons Foundation, Klingenstein Philanthropies, MAEVA Social Capital, Merage Foundation, Omidyar Network, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Pritzker Children’s Initiative—is committed to investing in dedicated providers to build quality practices. Home Grown believes that “ensuring all families have access to appropriate, affordable, and high-quality care for their young children is an issue that cuts across many systemic goals—education, economic opportunity, mobility from poverty, and increasing equity of opportunity.”

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Natalie is no stranger to big ideas. Her career has spanned the gamut of professional opportunities, all focused on serving children. She has worked in public sector nonprofit administration, and as a social worker for South Carolina’s Child Protective Services system, a job she called “eye-opening, and profoundly impactful in helping me see challenges families face.” She came to realize that before families can hope to thrive, they must first be able to simply feel safe, an opportunity not available to all. She ran a large educational department for a public health nonprofit, and then helped start the Fund for Quality, an initiative based in Philadelphia and replicated in Washington, D.C., as the Early Learning Quality Fund, that seeks to increase the ability of high quality providers in child care supply deserts to serve more children. 

Recently, Natalie began her own consulting business and would have been quite content to continue in that work if the “incredible” opportunity to become director of Home Grown had not appeared.

“Very little attention, investment and innovation has been given to home-based care,” Natalie told me, “and with the creation of Home Grown, we have the opportunity to change that.”

“In five years, how will you know you have been successful?” I asked.

“Well, I have just begun,” Natalie laughed, and then she grew thoughtful. “If in five years we see home-based child care represented in every important conversation about early care and education, I will know we have made a difference. If home-based child care gains the respect, acknowledgement and the compensation it deserves, that will be a success. And if home-based providers have access to more resources that improve the lives of the children and families that they serve we will have been successful. There is so much work to be done, but I am looking forward to it, and I would welcome conversations with providers, experts, funders or others in the field interested in discussing or engaging in this work.”