EARLY LEARNING FUND Overcoming the Opportunity Gap by Giving Children a Strong Early Start New Profit’s Early Learning Fund seeks a world where all children have a start in their earliest years of life that sets them on a course to fulfill their potential. Extraordinary advances in neurobiology and behavioral science, together with increasing public recognition of the importance of a strong start, have created a dynamic opportunity for transformative change in the early learning field. In the first years of life, 700 neural connections are created every second, forming the architecture of a young child's brain. By age four, children living in poverty are behind, often with less brain matter for information processing and executive functions than their higher-income peers. This early disparity can have a lifelong negative impact. Unfortunately, too few early learning models today can reach children and families with the scale and impact required to level the playing field. The Early Learning Fund is working to overcome these challenges by: (1) connecting and aligning researchers, practitioners, funders, and policymakers to pursue a shared action agenda and (2) investing in organizations, pilots and partnerships that have the potential to lift up new approaches to whole-child development and enable effective early learning for all children at scale. For more information, please download the Early Learning Fund prospectus here.