The ELC Assessment Tool provides the criteria needed to assess your community’s status in becoming an Early Learning Community, and helps you explore your goals, and to create momentum and alignment through an action plan. Over time, you can track your progress in a specific, data-rich and shareable way.

The ELC Assessment Tool is a collaborative resource designed to support local leaders—from mayors and executive directors to parents and service providers—through a process of assessing how well their community is currently supporting early learning and healthy development, and developing an action plan to make improvements in one or more areas. With this information, the ELC Assessment Tool can help you convene stakeholders to think critically about what you’re doing as a community to support young children and families, and to create an ELC Action Plan that builds on current strengths to address gaps.

The Early Learning Community Action Guide and Assessment Tool is built around the building blocks that make up an Early Learning Community. These are four broad areas that communities can focus on in order to improve how families with young children are supported to promote early learning and healthy development.

Identified by local leaders working to transform their own communities, the building blocks are:

• Community leadership, commitment, and public will to make early childhood a priority;
• Quality services that work for all young children and their families;
• Neighborhoods where families can thrive; and
• Policies that support and are responsive to families.

In an Early Learning Community, these building blocks are aligned, bolstered, and assembled in a way that builds on the strengths of the community and the families that live there.

Goals

Each building block is divided into three to six goals, describing the ideal conditions when that building block is established in a community. An early learning community is working on making progress toward these goals.

Levels

Within each goal are three levels that describe how close a community is to reaching the goal. Communities will likely be at different levels for different goals. The levels are meant to be hierarchical so that a community can build on its progress.

• Level 1 describes the starting point and is the first thing a community will want to establish on their path to reaching that goal. In many cases, the first level involves assessing the current situation in order to identify strengths and areas of need.
• Level 2 describes a community that is taking initiative and making some progress toward the goal. This may include communities where progress has been made for some pockets of the population, but those efforts are not benefiting the whole community yet.
• Level 3 indicates that a community has invested time, energy, and resources toward reaching this goal and is integrating their efforts across the early childhood system and/or with other sectors.

Some communities may find that this assessment process is the first time they have even considered some of the goals in this guide. In that case, the “not started” rating may be appropriate for one or more goals. The ELC Action Guide offers many possible action steps to include in the community’s ELC action plan to move to level 1.

Actions

The actions described within each level are examples of steps a community might take—things that have been done in other communities as they worked to build or enhance their early childhood systems. These are suggested actions but they are not an exhaustive list of requirements for meeting the levels. 

The particular actions a community chooses will differ depending on its social, political, financial, and historical context. One community may decide to implement a number of actions just as described in this guide, while another community may take inspiration from the listed actions and ask stakeholders to design their own actions that will help them get closer to that goal. 

Throughout this assessment tool, stakeholders can note actions that have already been taken that are similar to those on the provided list; select actions to include in their community’s ELC Action Plan; or write in other actions that would move the community closer to that goal. Whatever actions are included in the ELC Action Plan should be grounded in the needs and desires of families in the community who should inform the plan at every step of the way.

No, you can complete the assessments at your own pace. Your ratings and suggested action steps will save automatically, so you can pause at any time and return to it at a later date to add to it or revise it. If your community is focusing on one or two building blocks, you do not need to complete the assessments for the other building blocks. 

No, you can begin with any Building Block, in any order. It is recommended that communities that are just getting started begin with Building Block #1: Community Leadership, Commitment and Public Will to Make Early Childhood a Priority. It is recommended that communities that are just getting started begin with Building Block #1: Community Leadership, Commitment and Public Will to Make Early Childhood a Priority. As a reminder, once started, your ratings and suggested action steps will save automatically so you can pause at any time and return at a later date.

Find resources from all of the partners in the Early Learning Nation Collective at https://eln-collective.org/resources/resource-library/.

The community lead can see the aggregated ratings and suggested action steps from other community stakeholders. Also, the community lead can create a detailed action plan built around action steps suggested by other stakeholders.

The community lead should be knowledgeable about the community, its challenges, and its resources. The community lead should be a strong organizer and ambassador for early learning in your community. A community lead should have a talent for galvanizing the community around a shared passion and goals.

The community lead should know how to create and convene a group, be an active listener, and inspire the group to stay dedicated and on track to meet the goals in their ELC Action Plan.

This will vary from community to community, and be driven by the ambition and urgency of your goals, dedicated team members, and resources.

This will vary from community to community, and be driven by the ambition and urgency of your goals, dedicated team members and resources.

This will vary. Some teams come together from education, medical, family support, museum, and faith-based settings. Some communities get creative to collaborate cross-sector. Others take a two-gen approach. Some nonprofits and organizations create partnerships with municipal agencies and programs, or directly with business. Others advocate for policy changes or dive into politics to rally voters to support special referendums for early childhood interests.

Becoming an Early Learning Community is an ongoing process with continuous opportunities to make progress. In the At-a-Glance overview in Appendix A, you can quickly track where your community stands on each of the goals of an Early Learning Community and identify areas to take action. This overview document includes the level of detail that may be most helpful for some stakeholder groups or meetings.

Depending on where you are starting from, here are some special considerations: 

• Just Getting Started. If you are bringing together stakeholders for the first time or launching a new effort toward becoming an Early Learning Community, the steps in this ELC Action Guide should be very straightforward. A critical early step is identifying a leadership body or organization that has the credibility to convene people and resources to lead this effort.
• Building on Progress. If your community already has a track record of partners working together with a focus on early childhood issues, the ELC Action Guide and Assessment Tool can help you to identify your next steps—whether you choose to deepen your work in a particular area, expand your reach to new areas, or bring a new focus on equity and ensuring that all families with young children throughout the community are benefiting from the early childhood system in place. 
• Already Doing Well. If your community already has a strong early childhood system, the ELC Action Guide and Assessment Tool may serve as a way to validate your current efforts and identify some areas to focus new energy. For example, if you find that your community is already at a level 2 or 3 and close to reaching many of the goals related to community leadership and quality services, you might choose to focus on neighborhood issues or on policies that would better support families in raising children. If your community has an existing early childhood plan, you may pull some language or concepts in from the ELC Action Guide for ideas or actions that aren’t currently addressed in your plan.

The ELC Assessment Tool is set up for each account to be specific to one Early Learning Community. But if, for example, you’d like to complete the assessments for one community where you work and another where you live, you’ll need to create two separate accounts.

If you are focused on a particular neighborhood or city within a county that also has an Early Learning Community process underway, you should respond as a stakeholder for the community where you are most involved in the work.