A video showing national collaborative for infants & toddlers (ncit)
Gubernatorial elections create a key moment to elevate the opportunities and challenges facing infants, toddlers, and families. Governors shape state priorities, budgets, and policies that affect young children and the systems that support them.
This toolkit helps organizations engage strategically during the campaign cycle while staying within the boundaries of nonpartisan, 501(c)(3) issue-focused advocacy. While this toolkit focuses specifically on gubernatorial elections, the same principles apply to elections at every level of government — from city council to President.
If you are advancing policy solutions that strengthen nutrition programs and improve access to healthy food for babies and toddlers in your state, Voices for Healthy Kids invites you to apply. Funded campaigns will protect, strengthen, and/or expand SNAP, WIC or CACFP through state policy. Proposals must also include a federal advocacy component, lobbying and/or educating your state’s members of congress to help delay or reverse SNAP changes made through H.R. 1. See eligible states and all details at the link below.
This guide offers research-informed messaging and communications strategies that equip prenatal-to-three (PN-3) advocates to elevate the importance of early childhood issues and increase support among policy leaders.
Use these messages and strategies in legislative conversations, hearings, and testimony, policy briefings, and written materials such as one‑pagers, talking points, and public‑facing communications.
NCIT.org is here to support you in taking action to help all babies and toddlers thrive. Click on advocate, media or policy maker and be taken to areas of the site made just for you! Need something else? Send us an email!
Click on each icon to learn more on each supporter type.
It’s only when people like you share their voice can we pass the policies we need at the local, state, tribal and federal level. We can help you learn the issues, how to be an advocate and then take simple, effective actions to support good policies that help every child and family thrive.
Learn MoreNCIT is committed to advancing the most effective and promising policy solutions and we want to help policy makers with what they need to get these policies passed in their jurisdictions. Education on issues, white papers, access to experts, sample policies. We are here to support you from concept to passage and through implementation.
Learn MoreThe media is key to raising awareness and building support for those policies most critical to raising healthy, happy babies and toddlers. NCIT is here to support print, broadcasting and digital journalists with the info they need to develop and deliver compelling stories on the policies and programs needed to support every baby and toddler and their families. We can help with research, sources, data and copy.
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The National Collaborative for Infants & Toddlers is bringing together organizations and individuals across the US who want to improve the health and well-being of infants, toddlers, their families, and caregivers. Using policy advocacy as its tool, the NCIT and its members support federal state, local, and tribal efforts to pass effective policies and to maximize public investments in PN-3 systems.
The National Collaborative for Infants and Toddlers (NCIT) was created in 2017 as a vehicle to connect a diverse group of advocates, system leaders, philanthropy, researchers, policy experts and practitioners at the federal, state and local level who shared a common interest in addressing the needs of our nation’s youngest children. Developed with initial support from the Pritzker Children’s Initiative, NCIT was founded on the belief that beginning prenatally, every child and their family should have the support that they need for a strong start in life.
In its early years, NCIT focused on raising awareness of the need for stronger and more equitable prenatal-to-three (PN-3) policies and programs, measuring the impact of PN-3 investments and sharing what works to better support infants, toddlers and their families.
By 2022, American Heart Association (AHA), through its Voices for Healthy Kids project, became the steward of NCIT. Within this new home and with access to expanded funding sources, NCIT has been able to build on its original purpose, strengthen its support to advocates and increase its impact on PN-3 investments.
Voices for Healthy Kids, an initiative of the American Heart Association (AHA), provides the staffing and support structure for The National Collaborative for Infants & Toddlers. NCIT supports education and policies that at times are outside the realm of the AHA. This staffing and support should not be construed as endorsement by the American Heart Association.
