 Please welcome the case for investing in early childhood, what we can't afford to wait panel. Main stages, it's the main stage and the curse of being on the main stages, it's the main stage. So I would like to encourage everybody to make this feel a little bit more intimate, so rather than scatter yourself through a large auditorium, try to focus a little bit closer and I'm actually serious about that, so please come on forward and you get a chance. Welcome, it's great to be back, it's OCAP, fantastic to be back on the main stage. This time I have the distinct pleasure of moderating a panel of deep experts in the world of early childhood education and investing in child development. Before I take even one step though, I want to thank, resonantly and loudly, the team at Gary Community Investments. They are friends and colleagues and leaders and they have convened this year the first ever OCAP track on education in particular early childhood education and it's an extraordinary pleasure to be working with them, not just here but as an advisor to their work as they move towards 100% impact. A quick moment of self-introduction, my name is Matthew Weatherly-White. I'm a co-founder and managing director at the CAPROC Group we're a multi-family office focusing on primarily families with an emphasis on impact investing. We've committed over a billion dollars in impact capital over the last decade and we had a lot of fun doing it along the way. More is your main to this conversation. I'm also a co-founder of a non-profit in Idaho focusing on children with learning differences and we've invested over 30 million dollars in Idaho over the last 20 years. So it is with a clear and visible and endearing to myself interest in this subject and my pleasure to introduce my panelists today. When the Gary community investments chose to focus on childhood resiliency they did so with initially a sense of responsibility but more recently their board of directors challenged them to be more risky, more innovative and be more challenging to orthodoxy particularly in the world of investing in children and as an aside how many of you have ever heard of a board of directors at a pool of philanthropic capital telling their programmatic officers and their investment officers to be more innovative? Very, very cool. And one of their answers was to sponsor this childhood track at Socap. It's the first of its kind. And the track will braid together the four axes of investing in education and early childhood. First the moral imperative, the idea that every child deserves an opportunity to access the best education that a civil society can provide. Second the scientific rationale, the more we know about brain science the clearer the case becomes for investing in brain development. Third the economic justification, return on investments for early childhood investing is among the highest available due both to the long tail positive results government savings and clear benefits related to market demand. And then fourth the financial opportunity. A science policy and cultural awareness begin to fold together opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors expands exponentially. In this panel with experts in each one of those braided imperatives we'll frame these issues, we'll ground all of us in the challenges and we'll point to a set of answers and solutions that sit in so many ways at the very heart of what impact investing stands for. Job creation, local food systems, education, health care, opportunity quality, et cetera, et cetera. Four when one invests in children one is inevitably investing in the future. And what is impact investing at least from an abstract conceptual perspective if not investing capital today to create the world that we all want to live in tomorrow. So to the panel on my far right Judy Cameron is a neuroscientist at the University of Pittsburgh and a CEO of a recent startup working for kids. Doctor Cameron's research has shown that early life experiences not only change a child's behavior but they change the structure of the brain and we saw that referenced in the man who spoke about the Watson in early childhood education, their section was a fascinating, fairly brief but really powerful presentation that he did. She has been a member of the National Scientific Council on the developing child for the past 15 years and in this capacity she has spoken with most state legislatures in the country about how important experiences are in shaping brain development. Her new company has developed educational materials to translate this message to the public especially to those with low literacy using fun hands-on learning activities and games. Rob Grunewald is an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis. He conducts research on community development and regional economic issues. In 2003 he co-authored a landmark paper called Early Childhood Development, Economic Development with a High Public Return. And he has written several subsequent articles on the economic and social impact of early learning. And then Amy Clement in the middle is a partner at Omidyar Network and leads its education initiative globally. Omidyar Network has invested over $100 million in education to date, roughly evenly split between non-profit grants and venture investments in early stage for-profit education companies. Previous to Omidyar Amy was part of the early team at PayPal and ran product user experience design and project management. And then held similar roles at eBay after the acquisition. She is passionate about blending her product and technology expertise with her commitment to improving education quality. So what we're going to do here, and I hope to do it well, is to weave the world's brain research, economics, and finance together to give you a sense of the opportunities available for investing in childhood development. Opportunities that you can explore and pursue in a wide array of smaller sessions that will be threaded together by this education track over the coming days. And in so doing, we will lay the groundwork for new actors to enter the education space for experienced early childhood investors to think about their approaches with a more informed set of lenses and to bring into the conversation a breadth of experience that reaches far beyond the typical capital markets response. So to set the stage, Judy, I would like you to explain to us what investing in children and education is really about. Okay, well, I brought with me a six foot brain and you probably would like to have one too. At least I hope you would. So we at Working for Kids use this as a tool to teach people about brain development. Lots of people think the brain just develops. You don't have to do anything at all. And it's controlled by genetics. So what I'm going to do is tell you what genetics do and then how life experiences affect brain development. At the time a baby is born, they have essentially all of the brain cells they're ever going to have. And I like to use my hands as a model of brain cells. So all over the brain, there's brain cells sitting there ready to learn and do what they're supposed to do. What happens when the brain develops? Well, each of the cells reaches out extensions and that's what's genetically programmed and connects to each other. You have a billion brain cells, you have a lot of connections and you would think that the connections would stay. But in fact, a large percentage of the connections get pruned away as that particular brain area is being formed. So you have a billion brain cells, you have hundreds and hundreds of brain areas and they all develop at different times. The key question is what causes some connections to stay and the other connections to get pruned. And that's what's important to you. It's experience. The connections that get used the most stay. The connections that don't get used very much have a higher probability of being pruned. So to have a child have the sturdiest brain and be the most capable, you should give them experiences that strengthen circuits at the time each brain area is developing. We use this poster to talk about brain development and we talk about the fact that before the child is born, the areas of the brain that control sensory function like vision are developing. They're developing prenatally and for about the first year of life. And then in the early years that you'll hear so much about at this conference, there are other areas developing. There are areas that control and regulate emotion and interpret emotion. A baby cries the minute they're born. They're using this area of the brain. You have areas that control language and talking. Areas that control moving and all motor function like playing music. These are developing from prenatally to about five to seven years of age. So that's the period of plasticity. And then very interestingly, you have a part of the brain that really starts developing at birth that continues to make connections till about 11 or 12. And the pruning process goes on to 25 years of age. So when you take an 18-year-old and you say they don't seem like they're adult, well, their brain is not adult. They still are going to strengthen and make connections until they're 25. How does making connections work? What do experiences do? Well, we have very sophisticated scientific material here with us. Yeah. So if you want to have good circuits for reading, then we know that it's good to read to children and to have them read. So every time you introduce a child to reading, you're making connections between the visual areas and the areas that control language. Now, you don't just have to do reading a few times. It needs to be over and over and over again to make really strong connections that'll last. How much is enough? Well, I have lots of people who ask me, can I read to a child every day during the plastic period? I'm there. Well, that would be great. They're making connections for about seven years, times 365, about 2,500, you're way short. You need about 10,000 repetitions to make a really strong pathway. So you have to make reading so exciting that they'll read by themselves, they'll read with their friends, they'll read and read and read, and make a strong pathway they'll then have the rest of their lives. It turns out that everything that children do makes strong brain pathways. Whether you as an adult intend for it to happen or not, let's think of a child growing up in a situation where they're dealing with a lot of anger. They become expert at recognizing anger. And then most children will get out of the way so that they aren't the brunt of the anger. And if this happens regularly, they'll make really strong brain pathways for this. This is really protective for the child because it keeps them safe. They recognize anger, they get out of the way. The brain is doing a good job, but it has long-term repercussions. They're going to be experts at recognizing anger all their lives. They'll see more anger in the world. They'll develop health consequences of seeing more anger. And then we have this front part of the brain, and it connects to all the other parts of the brain. With luck, you learn to control your emotions. So the front part of the brain is involved in complex reasoning, problem-solving, inhibitory control. So even though we may all get mad occasionally at meetings, we don't lie down on the floor and have a temper tantrum, right? That's right. So the front part of the brain is working really hard when that happens. It also allows you to reinterpret what you see. And with luck, reinterpret what you do. So that is a quick summary of how the brain develops. Judy, thanks for that. It was really helpful as we think about investing in children to think about from the groundwork of brain development rather than necessarily point solutions around food or ed tech. Yes. And the fact that it's a long-term continuous process. Yeah, really, really helpful. Thank you. So, Rob, I'd like you to take the conversation from the scientific to the economic. In particular, I'd like you to reference the work and return on invested capital, investing in children and community development. Sure. We're glad to do that. To start with, a little disclaimer. The comments I make today are my own, not those of the Federal Reserve or my colleagues at the Fed. I come from the Minneapolis Fed, District 9 out of 12 district banks. Here we are in San Francisco, the 12th district. The research on early childhood development comes from the Minneapolis Fed from our research area. We're interested in how economies grow. What are those key ingredients of economic growth? And, of course, developing human capital and the skills of a workforce are what is a key to producing a strong economy. And what we've really got to know as economists, especially over the past 10 to 15 years, is the impact that the early years have on the long-term development of those workforce skills. So, Judy has set it up brilliantly on the skills that children learn early, including cognitive skills, but also those social-emotional skills that we need in the workforce 20, 25 years down the road. The foundation for all those skills are starting during the first few years of life. So, this really opens the eyes of economists to think about, in terms of workforce productivity, how are we investing in these early years, especially for children who are in vulnerable situations. The second piece is that we do have a series of research studies that have been able to follow children over time that come from those vulnerable situations, either growing up with poverty or exposure to other adversity, and ask this question, what is the impact of a high-quality early learning investment in a group-based setting, let's say, at a preschool program, includes parent education, or a home visiting program, or a professional or registered nurse, parent educator works with families that are vulnerable, especially those that have an expectant mother, or those with infants and toddlers. And four long-term studies, Perry, Abbasidarian, Chicago Child Parent, and the beginning of the Nurse Family Partnership, if you want to go read more, show that over a long time horizon, we can begin to look at the benefits of making these early investments. Some of those benefits come quite early. We can see improved birth outcomes, which is a cost saving to those hospitals and health systems. Also improved school readiness, reductions in special education, reductions in repeating grades, savings to our K-12 system. And then in the long term, once these kids have reached a workforce age, more likely to have a job or money in the workforce to pay less in taxes, and less likely to commit crime. So across these four studies, we see benefit-cost ratios of $7 for every dollar invested, up to $16 for every dollar invested. And when we ask, well, who benefits the most from these early investments? Certainly the children and families are benefitting, but across these four studies, the majority of benefits, 60 to 65% of the benefits, are accruing to the non-participant, to the taxpayer, to the public. So this means you don't even have to like children to achieve this high rate of return. You could be Scrooge, you know, before his enlightenment on the Christmas Carol and achieve this strong rate of return. It makes good business sense from a societal perspective. That was great. Thanks very much. What I'd like to do now is to take the foundation that Judy provided for us, combined with the economic case that Rob just outlined. I want to sharpen it a little bit and turn to Amy. And in particular, I'd like you to talk about the financial return discussion component part of it by focusing on how a media network thinks about investing for childhood development. And in our pre-call, the use of phrase that has been sort of rattling around in my head is investing from the cradle to the career. And can you just explore that a little bit and talk about how that has helped you source, identify, vet, and eventually commit capital to investable opportunities in childhood development? Yeah, absolutely. So our team of wonderful investors started off looking at... We've been investing in education in emerging markets for many years. We said, you know, we're sitting here in the U.S. where there's so much innovation. Let's take a look at what's here. So they started off by doing this, you know, very systematic overview of the space, actually building a system map of the U.S. education space and looked from cradle to career and looked at where could we have the most impact given our model of both grants and for-profits. And really came back and said, oh my gosh, like, you... What you just heard. There's so much opportunity. You know, for every dollar invested in early childhood, you can make seven in return. And so from an impact perspective, we said this is one of the highest opportunities out there. And then we also said, but what about, like, what else is going on in this space? Well, there's actually a lot of energy. There's so much... We've learned so much about the neuroscience and the science of learning and the economic benefits. And yet it's one of the, I think, least explored areas from an impact investing perspective. There's a handful of philanthropists, but there aren't a lot of investors out there who come at it from kind of a business perspective and a very, like, consumer-centric marketing distribution perspective. And we see a lot of opportunity. We see opportunity in a host of ways. And so, you know, as investors, you think about why now is this early? Is this the right time? The kinds of things that we see that are creating opportunity here are, as I said, the knowledge base of what supplies impact. But also technology. And this isn't, you know, I'm not... Yes, I come from Silicon Valley. I do not believe technology will solve all challenges. But there's this unique opportunity here where all of a sudden, parents and caregivers, they have cell phones. I mean, go to a playground, you know? The parents, the babysitters, the nannies, they're, like, on their phones half the time anyway. This is where parents and caregivers are. And we haven't fully utilized that communication channel. We know from behavioral economics that nudges work, et cetera. And we know that there's, like, real economic benefit. We also see real opportunity in Care Center and in other, you know, friends, family networks to use technology to bring costs down. And if we can bring costs down, that means we actually may be able to pay caregivers more. We may be able to invest more in curriculum and pedagogy. My colleague recently shared with me a fascinating stat that we pay caregivers in this country, zero to five caregivers, approximately the same as we pay parking lot attendants. That means we pay the same amount for people to watch our car as we watch our children in the zero to five age range when 85% of brain development happens. So we've got, like, there's, like, massive opportunity here to figure out how might we use technology to bring costs down such that we can reinvest where it really matters. So we talk a lot about community during our calls, and I'd like to explore that a little bit. This is not something we've prepared, but that just, that really sparks my curiosity. When you think about investing capital around this idea that we're addressing a cultural problem for paying children, you know, paying our caregivers for children so little, how do we think about that from an ROI perspective? How do we think about shifting that needle? What are you doing at a media network to capture some of the return on investment that Rob outlined? Yeah, so I will say we are new to this. We've been in this for about a year, and so there are partners that we've looked at that we haven't yet, we haven't yet partnered with, but people are doing really interesting things out there, like First Five Fund and others who are really creating awareness and advocacy campaigns. And so I would say the awareness in the general public of the importance of early childhood today versus five, ten years ago is significant, you know, thanks to the great work of my colleagues here, is significantly higher than it was before, and there's growing interest. Certainly at the higher income, we know there's significant willingness to pay. So let me just give you one example of an investment. We've invested in this company called Tinker Garden, and you can think of Tinker Garden as, you know, sort of Uber meets, you know, playgroups and high quality playgroups. So they're using the untapped labor market to facilitate playgroups in parks, putting the curriculum in the cloud. These guys have grown in three years from one group in Brooklyn to 48 states with 800 leaders, and they're getting, so they're reaching over 50,000 families in a very, very short period of time. And to the workforce point, they are, they're receiving 1,000 applications a month for these spots. So when structured correctly, and when given, you know, great curriculum and support, there's a lot of interest. So I do think things are shifting. I think we're seeing massive opportunities over the higher income, and we're working hard to figure out how do we continually reduce costs and have partnerships with things like Head Start, et cetera, to bring the costs down even further so we can reach lower income and folks that need it the most. Really cool, thank you. In this ever tech-enabled world, turbo boosting brain development and turbo boosting our children and optimizing for educational performance and in our conversation earlier, all three of you gently derided that notion. In particular, Judy, you and Rob really came out against this idea of an accelerant function for the way we think about educational investing. Can you sort of explore that? Maybe Judy could take a first cut at that. They're being encouraged to use language. They're getting a lot of use. So they're building strong brain pathways at the time that brain areas are plastic. You can't do better than that. You really can't supercharge that system. If you're doing a good job, that's great. The problem is that so many kids in the world are not getting that. They're living under circumstances where the adults around them are distracted by lots of other things, by poverty, by drug abuse, by not being present because of war or they've gone to prison. So there are a lot of children that are not getting the kind of encouragement that is needed for them to use brain pathways a lot. So I think it's really exciting that you can reach higher income kids with some of these things, that the real need is to reach lower income kids and kids living in really stressed communities or war zones. It was sobering what you said. It was sobering what you said in your introductory comments that even a family that reads to their children every single day is only a quarter of the way to those 10,000 interactions. Exactly. So how do you address that? I'm sitting here thinking to myself, every single night, and it's one of my personal pleasures, but wow, that's not nearly enough. I just learned, that's not nearly enough. So how do I deal with that? Well, so you really have to tailor learning to every single child. That's incredibly important. And it's why having high quality child care, which I think we're going to get to in a few minutes, matters. You need to tailor the intervention to the child. So my oldest daughter loved to read books about dinosaurs. So we had tons and tons of books about dinosaurs and she read them, then she read them to her stuffed animals, then she read them with her friends. That was great. My son, he hated reading and I thought, oh my gosh, what am I going to do? Well, I decided that I would find books that I hated and you might be thinking, well, how does that work? Well, he thought it was hysterically funny if I hated to read a book. So he would hide that book in the stack every night and pretty soon there were all sorts of books I hated and we had a big stack of books that I was forced to read and he had a ball. So I think you have to customize to the child and that takes a lot of brain power from adults. Really interesting. So Rob, can you talk a little bit about that as well? Sure. Just to build off this last comment by Judy. This is an area that's certainly right for more investment but it is very labor intensive. It's an area especially for vulnerable populations of how we empower parents with their role as parents and their first teachers of their children, how we empower the professionals, whether it's in health and nutrition or in our child care programs with skills and capacities to be able to address very challenging situations with children and families and as noted, many of them in the profession are underpaid. Why are they underpaid? Well, the benefits from this sector, as I mentioned before, are largely public and therefore we have in economics what we call a market failure. There are benefits that are accruing and spilling over from making these investments, especially for vulnerable children that accrue to all of society. So there's roles for impact investing and certainly government to step in and to support and to really build up these different structures, this different infrastructure. And as I mentioned, it's labor intensive and it requires a value adjustment in our society to put more resources to attract higher educated employees that have skills in training and that we are paying them so that there is lack of turnover for fostering human to human relationships with caring adults and young children because in those relationships is where the brain development is happening, where it's enriching. We can wrap a lot of technology and strategy around that structure to help it but at the end of the day, we're talking about human relationships creating at the end of the day very high economic value. Can I say something? Please. Yes, I completely agree and I think there's an opportunity for technology to nudge and change behavior. So there's this great organization called Parent Powered. It's a company that started at Stanford and they use text nudges to change parent behavior. And I mean, what's cheaper than texting and everybody uses it. The open rate is super high and it's very simple, three texts a week and they start out the first one on Monday is like, did you know? Wednesday is, and so you can and Friday is just a reminder. And the impact that this company has had is tremendous. And so, you know, it's super, super cheap and you know, if you are a... if you're a municipality, if you're a hospital, there's lots of customers for this kind of product given how inexpensive it is and the high impact it can have. So I don't disagree that it is about absolutely about the relationship. 100%. And I think there's an opportunity for technology to remind and help foster those relationships. Certainly. I've used your phrase in one of our conversations, it's responsive relationships and I want to dig into that for a second, but you also used your phrase a second ago that I bet everybody in this room picked up on which was market failure. And as an investor, I'm always interested in market failure because to me that's all about mispriced risk. As an investor, I'm hunting mispriced risk. But in the impact investing world, we talk a lot about negative externalities and it seems like this is a positive externality and of course as an investor, I think, well, how do we internalize that positive externality to capture it? But I'm not sure that's actually the right question, but how do you think about enticing commercial capital to come into a space that has all these positive externalities that to date are not being captured by the investor? Like what's the investment case there? Yeah, sorry, you've described it perfectly. There are positive externalities that are here for society to internalize. And they're societal in nature. We see them in terms of reducing costs to government. We see in the long game increasing productivity for the whole economy, which can be a benefit to businesses as well. So there are strategies from the social impact investing side is to come in and look at ways to be able to focus in on areas potentially lower hanging fruit to show our public sector that you can actually make an investment, make a difference and expand some of those investments. So for pay for success, contracts is an area that is being used in early childhood, such as expanding home visiting or preschool. There are other areas that we can look at in health and nutrition and where social impact investing could come in, make an upfront pilot project, show the benefit and actually accrue return in contracts with government and be able to move those type of investments forward. So we could get into a more technical discussion about what those type of business areas might be. I'm going to be rolling for the next two days so we can have a good talk about that. So I'm going to indulge my own curiosity here for a second, and I hope you guys don't mind, but we have a scientist, an investor, an economist, and we're just talking about the potential for internalizing into the capital markets what here to for have been positive externalities, which, like I said, I'm not sure that's even a really good idea. There's something really noble about the idea of investing for extensive, long-term, long-tail positive externalities. And should we, as investors, seek to capture that for our own balance sheets? I don't know. So I'm going to ask just like a poll almost among the three of you. What do you think? Like, is this something an investor should be trying to capture, trying to capture that positive return for our own IRRs? Or should we, as impact investors, be willing to take potentially concessionary returns in exchange for what are clearly evident, measurable societal benefits? What do you think? I think there's potential for huge return, and I'm not the economist in the group, but you look at what happens when children enter school not ready to attend school because they've seen a lot of adversity and haven't strengthened brain pathways. They have trouble in school, they don't progress, and once they get to be into middle school, they're very likely to be in trouble with the law. They're having trouble controlling their emotions. That's another thing that's learned. So working for kids is doing a huge amount of work with the juvenile justice system. The juvenile justice system actually has a very bad way of dealing with this. They tell them this is a bad thing to do and you should stop breaking the law, and it doesn't work. The recidivism rate is extremely high and they come back. What if we strengthened brain pathways in the teenage years so that they would be better at self-control, inhibiting their first inclination, long-term problem-solving? Those would be positive move forward. It would keep people out of prison, and that would save a huge amount of money. They'd go on and be capable of getting jobs and being a part of the market workforce. So to me, I see a lot of return. The way I would say is the role for impact investing, and there's a couple of roles. The first is recognizing in terms of partnering with government as the incentives in government are essentially to be relatively risk averse and not necessarily push out on the edges of innovation, and that's where social impact investments can certainly step in and be able to provide examples of where innovation can make a difference. Also recognizing that in the early childhood space, while certainly there's room for more investment in health and nutrition and early learning, there is already a lot of money there that could be spent better focusing in on quality, targeting resources to children with specialized interventions that will help them. For example, Child Protection System is a system that treats all children in a relatively similar framework. Yet each of these individual cases are examples of family and children that need individual support and connection to early childhood resources and mental health resources. I think in that sector there's opportunity to find returns. So it's not necessarily to capture the benefit, put it on the balance sheet of the social impact investing fund and go home and say, look how much money we made. It is nudging that sector. It is providing examples. It's bringing in some new energy, some new resources to make that sector better. And as a society, we start to internalize those external positive benefits. I mean, this is such an important message, right? Because as an investor, I'm always thinking about doing exactly what you just said we shouldn't be focusing on doing what I'm thinking. And yet my instinct as a capitalist, right, is to figure out a way to re-execute this problem so that my clients, our investors, can make a market return while creating these durable, long-term positive social benefits. So Amy, you're right at the intersection of that, right, with the Meteor Network where you do concessionary capital investments, you do PRIs, you do MRIs, you're also commercial actors. Like how do you resolve that tension within ON? Yeah. So I will say it's not an easy one, right? And if you look at the way, you know, most of our society is set up outside of these walls, beautiful walls of SoCAP, you know, public companies are incented for the next quarter. And, you know, a lot of the data shows that we value things that are near and versus the longer term. So, you know, I think what you've set up is a really important question. I think as impact investors, and particularly foundations doing PRIs and MRIs, you know, the way that we come at this work of impact investing is not so that we can make a return. It's so that we can build sustainable, scalable change. So we do not care about the return that you're making? We absolutely do because if there's no return, if there's no return, if the company has failed, then there's no impact. But the return is a derivative of the systemic change strategy. Is that what I'm hearing? The financial return is a derivative of the orientation. Exactly, exactly. And so, and that's how we look at it because we are impact first. But we also look across the spectrum. We have absolutely commercial return investments and we have some that are slightly lower. We did a piece in a Stanford social innovation review called Investing Across the Returns Spectrum. That was really good, by the way. Which highlights this. And so the question is, is when you're investing in companies that you think will return lower than commercial returns, why is that? And you have to be really, really rigorous, right? It can't be because it's a crappy business. It's a really small market. Well, then like, as impact investors, why are you investing there? The question is, why is it lower returns? And typically, when we invest in something lower returns, it's because it's catalyzing the market. It's the very early stages of a market and we think it's going to take longer. It's going to require more patience. The market doesn't exist yet. What is the market return for microfinance in Liberia and Sierra Leone? It doesn't really exist yet. So we've explored what we're really doing here. We're investing in children. We're investing in brain development and that brain development extends far beyond the classroom and far beyond the application of education technology. We also have learned very clearly why we are investing in the early years. I don't know if you remember the chart that, and I'm embarrassed to say I can't remember his name, the guy that Luis introduced. The chart that he put up where there was the green line which showed brain growth and then there was the blue line which showed accumulated education spend and then there was the yellow line which showed timing of education spending and at no point did the education spend line up with the period of brain growth. Talk about a market failure. So we know why we need to invest in earlier years and we have a framework for how do we think about that. So the question that I have, how can businesses play a role in informing the communities, those connected caregivers, the phrase that you used. The responsive relationships. Thank you, the responsive relationships. How can businesses play a role in informing those responsive relationships about the science, Judy, that you so clearly and beautifully outlined for us? What are our collective thoughts on that? Can I start with you this time and put you on the spot? Since you do most of your work with businesses, how do you think about businesses? The nudge thing was a great example, but what else are you looking at? Yeah, so we talked a little bit about Tinker Garden, we talked about parent powered. The more the how. I was also just thinking of some examples to make it more tangible. You know, at the end of the day, all parents want their kids to be successful. All parents want their kids to be thriving and to be as well positioned in life as possible. And so I think when businesses speak to that, when businesses speak to what parents are looking for and what parents need, I think there are open ears and there is a market. And Judy, you're building a business on this notion. So we market educational materials, but we're constantly trying to come up with new things that adults in the community can do with children that would strengthen children's brain pathways. So hands-on learning and activities is really important because in these populations, there's relatively low literacy levels and not good access. They do have phones, but there's not good access to computers, to books. So giving them hands-on activities matters. So working for kids has developed a new game called First Pathways. It's 146 activities that can be done between adults and children that cost no money. You don't have to go out and buy new things. We have a new game being developed called First Pathways Go, kind of like Pokemon Go, that is in collaboration with communities and has kids and parents using their phone to tackle bad guys in different locations in the community. So you can imagine a community getting really involved in this and having spots that are businesses that are attracting parents and kids. Now in this game, the kid is a superhero and it requires a parent, who's the sidekick, to use the phone at the same time to tackle the bad guy. So I think that there is a lot of room for innovation, developing new activities, new games, new fun ways to get parents and many times these children don't have their parents. So other adults in the community interact with the children so that they're using their literacy skills. They're using and learning how to regulate social-emotional skills. They're starting to understand empathy. We need lots of games that would do that. All science-based, of course. Yes. Have you seen any of these games that come out and you look at them and you just sort of roll your eyes and you say, this is just ridiculous. There are some really good games that teach kids things like math skills and literacy skills and we look at all of them. It's a fun part of our work first. We monitor all new games coming out. But many of them, the parent hands it to the child or the adult hands it to the child and the child is left on their own. You heard Rob talk multiple times about the importance of social-emotional skills and it doesn't build social-emotional connections in learning how to interact with each other and how to read people's facial expressions. Those are critical to success of a child when they get to school and when they get to the workforce. And so we need more things that encourage interaction that aren't just focused on handing a game off to the child. You mentioned this. The engagement of the parent and engagement of the community and Rob, you've been really constructive in my thinking around community, the broader community outside of the classroom, outside of the parent-child relationship. Amy, you sort of brushed up against one of your comments around this notion of privilege and how wealthy families are sort of already doing this. I think we need to make explicit that this conversation has to expand beyond privilege. Because as you said, Judy, those who really need this the most are least able to access this. So Rob, you mentioned on one of our calls how we need to think about the intersection of science and policy and finance and ask ourselves where we will find the highest returns to both the public and the private players in reaching the really vulnerable children. What have you seen in your research and in your work that is a really good exemplar of that? Well, bringing this all together, I guess one of my recommendations is from a social impact investment standpoint is to look at the early childhood sector and decide to go a bit deeper in one of those areas. For example, in childcare, where are the opportunities to help improve quality and access and improve that business model? Being able to look in health and nutrition, are there ways to reduce some of the cost or hospital systems among vulnerable populations such as reducing asthma, improving birth outcomes, whether that's through home visiting or providing doulas for low-income families? If doing some research, looking at how we're in our child protection system, we have lots of costs and that system doesn't seem to be helping kids get to school ready to succeed. So there are areas in which some business analysis could come in alongside that private sector and start to find where there are returns that could happen, potentially a pay for success or another type of instrument could be helpful in joining a partnership with government to be able to institute some of those strategies. But I'd also say is that there's a role for your political capital. Because we see a lot in the broader business community that when business leaders come to the table and speak on behalf of children, things start to move in the state legislatures and actually in Congress as well. I think business leader support and broader coalition support at the business level has been helpful to maintaining investments in young kids at the national level and we see that when businesses are organized with those type of efforts at the state level, we see expansions in those type of investments. I love the fact you brought up that angle. I'm always reluctant to talk about it. Most of us in this community are typically reluctant to talk about it and one of the great ironies to me is that we talk about being values-based investors and yet I think the most effective values-based investor alive today is probably the Koch brothers because they are unrepentant in harnessing their political capital, their commercial capital and their philanthropic capital in support of their values and yet we as a community of impact investors get that third chord, that political side and it's a great reminder to do that a little bit more effectively. So we've got, I think, one minute left. Can I just make a quick comment? Yeah, absolutely. Quick comment around the high income. Please be clear that the levels of toxic stress and low income are so much higher and we do need to focus on low income but a staggering statistic that I think is really important so one third of children in the United States show up to kindergarten not ready. They're not ready for kindergarten across social emotional, motor, behavior, etc. And 80% of those kids who show up not ready are from low income. But 25% of high income kids show up for kindergarten not ready. 25% of high income kids. So just my point is... That's a great reminder. I'm not here to invest for high income necessarily but as a society there's still a lot of work there's still a lot of work we need to do. That's great. So I could certainly close this down but I would like for each of you to have an opportunity to say like the one primary takeaway from your work be it brain development or ROI to society or whatever just like a popcorn come to mind what's the most important takeaway for each of you or so that we can plant the seed of curiosity for new investors and we can encourage everybody in this room and hopefully more people than this to attend some of the breakout sessions on education to develop a much deeper and richer understanding of the opportunities in this space. Judy, I'm going to let you lead off. Of course I'm going to say you should always think about strengthening brain pathways and you build brain pathways from the time you're born to the time you're 25. I get asked a lot. Is it too late once you get past the early years? No, it's not. You have to strengthen other pathways but think about everything you can do to strengthen brain pathways. Yeah, I would just say we looked cradle to career this is clearly the place of highest impact and so I would invite you to get involved and see what you might do to continue to move the field. The majority of benefits to investing in vulnerable children and families accrue to the public at large. We have it. Thank you all very much. I want to give this great panel. Thank you. And one more enthusiastic thank you to the team at Gary Community Investments. As I said, it's an honor to work with them as an advisor. A pleasure to be asked to have moderated this panel of experts to join some of the more deeper sessions over the next few days. So thank you all for joining us.