When I began in the role of Director of Raising Illinois, our state’s collective effort to close the opportunity gap for our youngest learners, Raising Illinois was just a piece of paper. Now, five years later, our coalition has grown in power and in number! Our members include nearly 2,200 organizations and individuals across our state – from advocates to state agency leaders, pediatricians and therapists, providers, community leaders, parents, grandparents and caregivers. In our first five years, our coalition has made significant progress towards the goals we laid out in our founding Prenatal-to-Three (PN3) Policy Agenda. Raising Illinois’ inaugural PN3 Policy Agenda was a blueprint for our first five years and acted as our ‘north star,’ laying out a vision that our members created, informed, and rallied around. 

At the start of last fiscal year, we started a yearlong process to update our coalition’s goals, objectives and ways of working, ultimately gathering the input of nearly 1,000 folks across our state. We evaluated our successes and challenges, strategized with state agency leaders and subject matter experts and listened to families, providers and folks in the field serving our youngest learners. 

In the conversations we had across the state on current and future priorities for Illinois, we heard time and time again that our families are facing a new landscape with new challenges. With prices going up on everything from diapers to groceries, supporting our youngest learners and their caregivers is more important now than ever. We made sure that our refreshed Prenatal-to-3 Policy Agenda reflects changes in the federal and state landscape as well as new hardships and priorities for infants, toddlers, and expecting families in Illinois. 

We used several key activities to guide this process. We began with our high-level Summative Report on progress made towards our five-year objectives, conducted a data review of our key metrics, and identified new objectives to meet the changing federal and state landscape. This helped us develop our initial draft. From there, we dove into soliciting feedback from public agencies, organizational partners, families, advocates, providers and community members to ensure that we were on the right track and had captured what was most timely, relevant and important to our coalition. During this period, in addition to our virtual engagements, we convened 6 meetings with over 150 key contributors, held community conversations across our state with over 230 participants, connected with 13 public partners across 6 state agencies, and launched a statewide survey with over 300+respondents.