Overview
Waco Foundation is a community foundation based out of Waco, Texas. Established in 1958, the Foundation invested $5.7M in the form of grants, scholarships, and community programs in 2021, and manages over $130M in assets.
In 2009, Waco Foundation commissioned a study on the state of early childhood education and care in McLennan County, TX. This was based on the premise that the most valuable and cost-effective education investments the Foundation could make were at the early childhood stage. The report, titled “2009 Childhood Quality of Life Index,” revealed significant geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic disparities in access to services and outcomes for young children (ages 0-3).
These findings served as a call to action for Waco Foundation leadership. According to Nicole Wynter, the Foundation’s Senior Director of Community Investment: “Children’s experiences were different by zip code and due to the history of redlining in our area, we know that some neighborhoods had and continue to have higher concentrations of people of color than others.” Ashley Allison, the Executive Director of the Foundation echoed: “By going through that [early childhood] work, we determined that race was an important factor to address.”
In this way, the 2009 study on early childhood became the starting point for Waco Foundation’s equity journey, an ongoing effort to learn about racial disparities and disproportionalities, embed principles of equity into the Foundation’s programs and operations, and disseminate these principles throughout the broader Waco community.