The Faces of ECE series is designed to raise awareness of the many early care and education professionals who are supporting one of the most important fields in America today. From the people on the front lines working with children to those working behind the scenes to prop the system up from within, everybody has a role to play and a story to tell. Child Care Matters is committed to sharing those stories.

One of the things I love about early childhood policy is that the evidence is so clear. We know that investments in evidence-based early childhood programs, services, and interventions can create positive outcomes, including short-, medium-, and long-term returns on investments across a variety of education, health, social, and economic indicators. 

Even when policymakers are compelled by the evidence, the inevitable question looms, “but how will we pay for it?” 

Mary C. Garvey has helped governments effectively navigate this question and successfully evaluate if innovative financing mechanisms like Pay for Success would be a good option. 

If you’ve never heard of Pay for Success, it is a public-private partnership that uses outcomes-based financing to expand social services in pursuit of improving specific outcomes. Basically, Pay for Success is a way to evaluate the degree to which social investments can both create positive outcomes and government savings, as well as contribute to the evidence base of a program/intervention’s effectiveness. 

They’re complicated, extraordinarily rigorous projects which often require sophisticated, quasi-experimental research design methods, as well as an ability to manage complex relationships between public and private entities that have wildly different motivations & interests. And, to be successful, they have to center equity in both intervention and research design.

If it isn’t abundantly clear, I think so highly of the people who are able to do this type of work…and Mary is one of these professionals who has quite a few of Pay For Success projects under her belt! 

I was thrilled to speak with Mary about her complex and deeply impactful work and am honored to be able to introduce her to you here.

Introduction and Background

Keller Anne Ruble: Hello and welcome to this episode of Faces of ECE, Mary! Can you start by giving us some background on who you are, what you do, and your experience in the early care and education (ECE) space?

Mary C. Garvey: Thank you for having me, I’m so excited to be here. My name is Mary Garvey and I’m currently the Chief of Equity and Innovative Financing at the Institute for Child Success. We are an early childhood organization focused on improving outcomes from the prenatal stage through age eight, so we really work through the early childhood ecosystem, hitting all points that pertain to young children and the adults in their lives.

Prior to coming to ICS, I was a policy analyst at a patient advocacy organization and when I saw this opportunity posted—I came in as Associate Director of Pay for Success Financing, which I think we’ll get into a little bit today—I immediately wanted to research the position further, because I liked the organization’s mission. I saw that Pay for Success had real promise for improving outcomes and it provided hope, and I knew I needed to apply.

As someone who grew up not with a lot of money, but with top tier  access and exposure due to parents who were adamant about a great education for me and my siblings, it is really important to me that young children have access. Education can be the thing that begins to level the playing field and helps to provide a higher quality of life.

I didn’t necessarily envision myself working in early childhood, but I knew that I wanted to be impactful at the intersection of social economics, race, and education. That’s something that is close to my heart, and a lot of it has to do with my own experience in the education system in New York City in both public and private settings.  

Keller Anne: ICS really looks at a lot of different things and supports a lot of different things, including Pay for Success. Can you tell us a little bit more about the organization’s mission and what kind of projects you work on? 

Keller Anne: What are some of the positive outcomes you’ve been able to measure from the Hello Family Spartanburg project?

Mary: The second year stats that came out of the Hello Family Spartanburg continuum of services included a 44% reduction in low birth rate, a 10% reduction in maltreatment, and a 12% increase in breastfeeding initiation. 

When you think about how these things disproportionately impact certain populations, particularly black women, the outcomes speak to equity, which is one of our values as an organization. Maybe it’s kind of a dirty word today, but we’ll stick with it because we know it’s good work and we cannot positively impact young children without thinking about their adults and what’s equitable for them in their communities. At the end of the day we know that everyone does not have the same level of access, and that’s all we’re talking about. 

What I’ll add about that particular project is we’re the folks who are in the background with the research, including our Director of Innovative Finance, Kaitlin Watts who actually lives in Spartanburg and is very hands-on. There are some really wonderful people on the ground there. Specifically the providers at Family Connects, which is the universal home visiting program, and Birth Matters, which is the doula program. These service providers are doing really good work, and they are the reason that we have these outcomes.  

Innovative Financing and Equity Work

Keller Anne: When you say “feasibility,” or “determining something to be feasible for innovative financing,” what do you mean by that?

Mary: We have a whole 12-step process behind determining feasibility. One of the most important things is to make sure that it’s always being approached as a partnership with the community. That requires an acknowledgement that there is local expertise—parents as the experts on their children, service providers as the experts on their programs and interventions, community members as the experts on what might work best or what’s already working really well. An innovative financing model is not going to work without community partnership.

Listening sessions are a really important part of that work. Hearing the community talk about what their goals are and what their challenges are. Then it’s our job to crunch those numbers and say, “Ok, is there really a gap here, or are things not as bad as the community thinks when we look at the data?” But we don’t rely on just numbers, because we care about the humanity behind it, so understanding the community dynamics is crucial.

Next, we look at the literature; what are the programs that might create the most impact or might produce the outcomes that we want to focus on? Then we project what the impact might be—what might be the take-up rate of a certain program? Then we can come back to the community with estimates and say, “According to our research, we can estimate that implementing this program might result in an x-percent increase” in third grade reading or kindergarten readiness, or whatever it is we might be focusing on. That part is really important to investors as well, to boost their confidence that the funds will be put to good use in an evidence-based way.

It’s not only about numbers. There are so many qualitative factors to consider, but it all starts with “Does the community want this?” That’s why, when we talk about engaging with stakeholders, we really mean the grandmas, the uncles, the dads, and even the children themselves, not just the people who wield power and influence in the way we typically think. 

Keller Anne: What is the ultimate goal of a feasibility study? Do you have any examples of places where projects changed course after a study was complete?  

Keller Anne: What are some of the common themes you’ve seen in successful projects that government and communities should be aware of?

Mary: I spend a lot of time thinking about service providers and teachers, and how underpaid they are. It’s one of the things that the Early Childhood Common Agenda, our organization’s advocacy arm in South Carolina, has looked at and rallied folks around, specifically compensation for Head Start teachers. Our organizational leads on this work, Deborah DePaoli and Citlaly Rojo are South Carolina-based and have done extensive work. There is a significant disparity between what folks who are working with young children make compared to their counterparts in K-12. For certain projects, we’ll look at things like “Is it possible to put in a retention bonus?” It all comes back to how we can make these educators feel valued and how we can mitigate the risk of turnover in this field. 

A lot of women work in this field. A lot of black women work in this field. They are already underpaid, and now we’re not retaining their services because they can’t afford to take a job at an early childhood center. It’s important work, and I would argue that the saying should be “Those who can, teach.”  

Other trends include looking at the research to see how program outcomes and needs differ between various demographic groups. A lot of early research around evidence-based programs and interventions was done with a particular population in mind, so we need to make sure that our recommendations take into account that we live in a diverse country and we need to understand how our research findings extend to black and brown families, urban areas, rural areas, and other groups with the lens of equity in mind. That doesn’t mean there’s an automatic assumption that what works for white families will not work for black and brown families, but it could be a nuance as simple as “We need to become culturally aware and do recruitment a little differently,” or “How can we retain these families so they can benefit from the program?”

Keller Anne: Speaking of which, I'd love to talk about some of the equity work you're leading. What is the role of equity in the work that you do? 

Engaging with ICS

Keller Anne: We have a variety of readers from state agencies, community organizations, national member organizations, service providers, and more. What are some of the reasons why they might want to partner with ICS, and how would they get that conversation started? 

Mary: We get excited to hear about any potential mission-aligned partnerships, undoubtedly. If there is a need you would like addressed, whether that’s a feasibility study—it does not have to be impact investing-related—or a literature review, or an equity analysis, I would say that we are one of the best at looking at programs and projects that are about to launch and identifying how to build capacity and optimize impact. 

If you’re not sure you want to do a feasibility study and you just want to learn more, we can put together packets of information around impact investing and the kinds of programs we’ve seen success with. Any of the things I’ve mentioned, and some I haven’t—maltreatment, child welfare, early childhood education, children’s health, improving maternal outcomes, implicit bias trainings, tax and fiscal policy—we can provide a consultation or relationship-building tools with all of that. Let’s have a short conversation and put together a plan for how to proceed. We can tailor our work to what you need and most value at the moment. 

Editor's note: Visit the Institute for Child Succcess's website here to learn more about the work they're doing, or complete their Get In Touch form to connect directly with their team.