This volume presents the proceedings of a research conference convened by the Human Capital Research Collaborative (HCRC), hosted by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, on the critically important topic of increasing and sustaining early childhood development gains. I welcome the opportunity to provide a brief foreword for the proceedings, as I am grateful for the work of these scholars on this crucial topic.
By way of background, let me note that, as Provost and Executive Vice President of the University of Minnesota, I had the privilege of working with the members of our Twin Cities campus community to create and implement a campus strategic plan that reinvigorates our commitment to the land-grant mission of the University. The HCRC exemplifies two of the campus plan’s four main strategic pillars, so the work presented at this conference clearly aligned with our institution’s central aspirations.
One pillar of our campus plan is a commitment to capitalize on the extraordinary breadth, as well as the quality, of our research capacity, in order to address the world’s grand challenges. We understand “grand challenges” to be not only deep and difficult problems, but also multifaceted challenges, requiring expertise and ideas drawn from many spheres and disciplines in order to be effectively addressed. These grand challenges are among the most important and complex problems facing local communities, states, nations, and the world.
Enhancing individual and community capacity for a changing world, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to realize his or her potential, is one of the aims of the HCRC, and it is also among the five grand challenges explicitly identified as a priority research focus for our university. This is a meaningful alignment of goals, one that promises constructive synergies.
Another central pillar of our campus strategic plan is a commitment to reciprocal engagement with our various communities, a commitment to draw on and respond to our specific location in a vibrant but complicated metropolitan area. The University of Minnesota wants to work with community, government, nonprofit, and corporate partners on shared priorities, with mutually inflected identification of issues and of pathways forward.
For more than ten years, the HCRC has exemplified reciprocal engagement. The HCRC is focused on the links between human capital and economic development, public health, and K–12 education. In another iteration of this reciprocity, it must be noted that the future of the University of Minnesota – which exists to develop human potential – also depends upon our community’s commitment to develop the potential of its children.
Thus, I’m delighted that this center brought together researchers, policymakers, and funding organizations to focus on the challenge of sustaining early childhood developmental gains. I want to thank Arthur Reynolds, Judy Temple, and Art Rolnick for leading this effort, and all of the participants of the conference and contributors to the volume for this signally important work.
