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Why We Do It

Our Mission:
EPIC works to harness the political and financial capital of Colorado's business sector to ensure that all children develop into healthy, educated and productive citizens.

Our Vision:
Tomorrow's engineers, bankers, teachers, health care providers, military leaders, and business leaders are starting their educational careers today.  At EPIC, we believe that it is our duty to ensure that the children entering kindergarten today will have the skills they need to be the leaders of tomorrow.
 
If you care about the long-term fiscal environment of Colorado and our nation...It is less costly to invest early in our children than to provide remediation, prison, or other social supports.
If you care about the quality of your community...Over time early investments can increase high school graduation rates and decrease crime rates for those children who participate in high quality programs.
If you care about your business's future workforce...Investments in quality early programming can increase the number of our youth who graduate from high school ready to move on to post-secondary success.
If you care about the commitment and productivity of your current workforce...Reliable quality care for children reduces the worry and concern about parents during the workday and can reduce child care related absenteeism.
 
Research shows that children who enter kindergarten ready to succeed grow up to be the book-smart, team-capable, job-ready workers who help businesses prosper.  Children in Colorado are not entering kindergarten ready to learn and succeed.  By age five, at-risk children can fall far behind their peers not only in understanding numbers and letters, but also in such crucial skills as perseverance and cooperation - key attributes to be successful in the workplace.

 

Research shows that:

  • Children born with low birth weight and with fewer parental resources have poorer health, are less likely to work, and have lower earnings as adults.
  • By age three, children of parents on welfare have a vocabulary foundation for the future of about 500 words; of working-class parents, 700 words; of college-educated parents, 1,200 words.
  • By age five, a child’s brain reaches 85% of its adult weight and develops 700 neural synapses – the connections that help them learn – every second.
  • Of 50 children who have trouble reading in first grade, 44 of them will still have trouble in fourth grade.
  • Children who move three or more times between the ages of four and seven are nearly 20% less likely to graduate from high school.
  • Children who are chronically hungry are more likely to be in special education, to repeat a grade, to get into fights, and to have lower test scores.

Together we can increase their odds of success.  By investing in our youngest learners today, we can build tomorrow's workforce to keep Colorado strong.

 

Public investments in children from birth to age eight must be a top priority - not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is an economic necessity.  Nobel Prize winning economist James Heckman's return on investment analysis shows the older the individual, the lower the rate of return.  The opportunity cost is greatest with the youngest in our society.

  
Graph taken from www.heckmanequation.org.
 
For more information, please visit the Resources Page.