Home Grown

Home Grown is a national funders collaborative with the mission to improve access to and the quality of home-based child care (HBCC) across the United States. Nearly 7 million children under age 5 receive their child care experience in a home-based setting. Parents choose this care for various reasons including availability, convenience, affordability, and shared culture or child rearing practices. Despite the critical role of home-based child care in serving families, many HBCC providers struggle to remain open. Home-based child care providers often live in poverty while working full time.

Home Grown envisions a country in which all children have the care they need to reach their full potential (cognitive, social, emotional, health and wellness), providers offer quality child care, and parents have equitable access to quality child care for their children. 

Home Grown makes strategic investments across a multi-pronged approach to realize its mission. We work to remove policy barriers, support networks, strengthen home-based child care practices and business models, and support the growth and recognition of the sector so that all providers offer quality care and parents choose quality care.  We seek to raise the profile of HBCC, elevate the voices of providers and families, and support coalition-building and advocacy.

The Home Grown collaborative is backed by 11 funders: the Bainum Family Foundation, Buffett Early Childhood Fund, Gary Community Investments, Heinz Endowments, Heising-Simons Foundation, Imaginable Futures, Klingenstein Philanthropies, MAEVA Social Capital, Merage Foundations, the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, and the Pritzker Children’s Initiative. Home Grown operates as a project at the Health Federation of Philadelphia.