Before the First App: One Settlement, Many Breakthroughs

States and coalitions across the country are deciding right now how to use Meta Settlement dollars meant to help children and families thrive. Most of the public conversation focuses on direct harm response — but there's a less obvious, higher-leverage option: investing in the prenatal-to-five years, when the brain builds the capacities — Early Relational Health, executive function, resilience, and language processing — that shape everything from reading proficiency to mental health to substance use risk, years before a child ever holds a phone.

This webinar makes the case for that investment, and for doing it together rather than alone. Because no single state is competing with another for its own Meta Settlement dollars, there's a rare opportunity for states to pool a modest slice of this funding toward shared strategy, shared measurement, and shared infrastructure — rather than each state rebuilding the same groundwork in isolation. That same infrastructure then strengthens work far beyond this one funding stream: reading proficiency, substance abuse prevention, youth mental health, suicide prevention, and high school graduation efforts can all draw on it too.

You'll hear from funders, researchers, and practitioners already putting these ideas into practice, and leave with a concrete way to get involved: joining an emerging cohort of states and coalitions working together — not against each other — to make this decade of funding count.

Relevant for state and coalition leaders working on Meta Settlement allocation, Preschool Development Grant (PDG) applications, and related block grant funding, as well as funders and researchers interested in prenatal-to-five investment.

Presenters:

Bill Barberg, President and Founder of InsightFormation, Inc.

Diana Fishbein, Senior Scientist, Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at UNC-Chapel Hill, President & Co-Director of the National Prevention Science Coalition to Improve Lives, Nova Scholar.

Kesley Shaw, M.S.Ed., Children, Youth & Family Systems Executive | Former HHS Office of Head Start Division Director ($850M+, 1,600+ Grantees) | Former PA CCDF State Administrator | Strategy, Operations & Public Funding

If you’d like to attend, please fill out this brief form and we’ll save you a spot