[2] The First Five Years Fund is an education initiative committed to improving the lives of at-risk children by leveraging cost-effective investments in early learning.
[4] Grumman enrolled at Duke University in 1981 with hopes to pursue a career in hotel and restaurant management; she even attended a cooking school in Paris, France beforehand to prepare.
However, after meeting professional journalists at Duke through the DeWitt Wallace Center's Visiting Media Fellows program, she decided to reorient her ambitions, and pursue journalism.
[5] The First Five Years Fund's goal is to expand high-quality early learning services to one million additional children from birth to age five, with half of that expansion serving infants, toddlers and their families.
This emphasis on early learning services for babies and toddlers is because by the time a child turns three, a majority of their brain growth has already occurred.
If we want greater school success later and a better-skilled workforce, we need to ensure the proper development of our most at-risk children at these earliest ages.
Grumman received a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for her series of Chicago Tribune editorials "Restoring Justice," that she wrote on capital punishment.