Editorial: Early childhood initiatives bring results

Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation hosted its annual luncheon last month. It was another outstanding event with some 200 of our partners from across the region. Together we celebrated our past year’s success stories, with our theme of “Investing in Children.”

Senior fellow at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, gave the keynote address highlighting his research on the economic benefits derived from early childhood education.

We know our foundation’s dollars invested in early childhood do provide great returns — we see these success stories firsthand. But for our partners to hear about the sound, economic returns from Rolnick, the former senior vice president and director of research at the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, was powerful.

He stressed that quality early education provides a high rate of return (up to 18 percent annually), and he reported on current efforts to provide scholarships to quality early childhood centers for all at-risk children in Minnesota.  

  As always, our work at SMIF is made possible through our many partners and supporters who share our vision for southern Minnesota. We thank all who attended our luncheon and those who have supported us in the past year.

  As we begin transitioning into next year, we’ll be wrapping up our year of focus on early childhood and now move to put the spotlight on our foundation’s entrepreneur development work. For more information about our program areas or to view the online edition of our 2012 annual report, visitwww.smifoundation.org.

Tags: opinion, editorial