Early Childhood Welfare, Early Childhood Education and Play, and Parenting Education

Overview

The Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood is an incubator of promising research and development projects that appear likely to improve the welfare of young children, from infancy through 7 years, in the United States. Welfare is broadly defined to include physical and mental health, safety, nutrition, education, play, familial support, acculturation, societal integration and childcare.

Grants are only made if a successful project outcome will likely be of significant interest to other professionals, within the grantee’s field of endeavor, and would have a direct benefit and potential national application. The Foundation’s goal is to provide seed money to implement those imaginative proposals that exhibit the greatest chance of improving the lives of young children, on a national scale. Because of the Foundation’s limited funding capability, it seeks to maximize a grant's potential impact.

The Foundation provides funding in the following areas:

Early Childhood Welfare - Children can only reach their full potential when all aspects of their intellectual, emotional and physical development are optimally supported. Providing a safe and nurturing environment is essential as is imparting the skills of social living in a culturally diverse world. Therefore, the Foundation supports projects that seek to perfect child rearing practices and to identify models that can provide creative, caring environments in which all young children thrive.

Early Childhood Education and Play - Research shows that children need to be stimulated as well as nurtured, early in life, if they are to succeed in school, work and life. That preparation relates to every aspect of a child’s development, from birth to age seven, and everywhere a child learns – at home, in childcare settings and in preschool. We seek to improve the quality of both early childhood teaching and learning, through the development of innovative curricula and research based pedagogical standards, as well as the design of imaginative play materials and learning environments.

Parenting Education - To help parents create nurturing environments for their children, we support programs that teach parents about developmental psychology, cultural child rearing differences, pedagogy, issues of health, prenatal care and diet, as well as programs which provide both cognitive and emotional support to parents.

​The Foundation will not fund:

• programs outside of the United States
• the operation or expansion of existing programs
• the purchase or renovation of capital equipment
• the staging of single events (e.g. concerts, seminars, etc.)
• the creation or acquisition of works of art or literature
• the activities of single individuals or for-profit entities
• political or religious organizations
• programs with religious content
• programs to benefit children residing in foreign countries
• medical research applicable to both adults and children

The Foundation employs a two-step grant application process that includes the submission of both a Letter of Inquiry (LOI) and a Full Proposal–the latter only by those applicants requested to do so. This ensures that consideration of Full Proposals is limited to those applications that strictly comply with the Foundation’s programmatic guidelines.

Applicants must submit Letters of Inquiry.  Once a Letter of Inquiry is received by the Foundation, the Directors will determine if the proposed program fits the Foundation’s funding guidelines. Successful applicants will be invited via email to submit Full Proposals.  All letters of inquiry that don't comply with the limitations will be rejected.

The Foundation’s Board will only approve a maximum of 15% of a project’s direct expenses, when earmarked as general and/or administrative overhead.