Owen Bradford Butler, former chairman of Procter & Gamble Co., spent much of his career asking why thousands of job applicants lacked the level of reading and writing skills required to work at his company.
To analyze the problem, he went to colleges, then high schools, then middle schools, then elementary schools. Was it preschool where this problem began?
The problem began much sooner than that, Butler found.
“He decided that there’s absolutely nothing that schools can do to remediate people who haven’t gotten the nurturing they need from age zero to 3,” said his daughter, Nancy Butler Accetta.
Butler died at age 74 in April 1998, but not before launching a solution. In 1995, he got together with then-Gov. Roy Romer to found Bright Beginnings, a private, nonprofit group that sends volunteers to homes of Colorado’s newborns. Today the group makes about 12,000 visits a year.
Babies don’t come with owner’s manuals. And parents – often caught up in making a living – don’t always give their newborns the attention they need. Bright Beginnings aims to help new parents overcome the modern breakdown of the extended family, where grandparents, aunts and uncles once filled in the gaps.
A fragile newborn handed off to even the most educated adult can engender in the caregiver awkwardness, fear and even feelings of inadequacy.
And what may seem instinctive – hold the baby, talk to the baby, sing to the baby, play with the baby – is not always so.
“I would like, before I die, to see Colorado as a state in which every infant gets as much care as Klondike and Snow,” Butler said in a newspaper interview at the time of the program’s launch. Klondike and Snow were two headline-grabbing baby polar bears at The Denver Zoo.
Bright Beginnings executive director M. Valin Brown touts research showing that 85 percent of brain development occurs during infancy.
“The critical windows of development are in the first three years of life,” he said. “The funny thing is, during those same years, less than 10 percent of (public-education dollars) is actually invested.”
Brown says every dollar invested in helping people 3 and under saves between $4 and $9 in the years to come.
“There’s less incarceration, less juvenile delinquency, more high school and college graduation, and more earning potential later in life,” he said.
Most people find out about Bright Beginnings through health-care providers. Bright Beginnings is available to any parent, regardless of socio- economic status, although 55 percent of its clients are low-income families and 26 percent are single mothers. In 2005, 51 percent of its clients were Caucasian, 41 percent were Latino and 3 percent were African-American.
Co-founders Butler and Romer felt that home visits to newborns and distribution of educational materials to their parents were the types of efforts that could easily be dashed by a cash-strapped legislature. The two felt this mission was too important to be left to lawmakers, so the program has always operated on donations from private individuals, foundations and companies. The group’s annual revenues total less than $800,000. The agency is seeking funding from this year’s Post-News Season to Share campaign.
Accetta, who has long served on Bright Beginnings’ board, said she is not just following in her father’s footsteps. She worked as a teacher in inner-city schools.
“I was faced every day with a child who was nurtured as a baby and a child who was not,” she said. “If they’re not ready to learn by the time they come to school, there’s not much we can do no matter how hard we try.”
Bright Beginnings addresses this need in Colorado like no other program.
“You can spend $1 million when they are 16, and chances are you are not going to do any good,” Accetta said. “But if you can get them between zero and 3, you’ve got a really good chance of making a difference.”
How to donate
Post-News Season to Share, a fund of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, gave more than $1.73 million to 56 agencies last year serving children, and people who are hungry, homeless or in need of medical care. Donations are matched 50 cents to the dollar, and 100 percent of the donations go to the charitable agencies. To contribute, please see the coupon, call 888-683-4483 or visit seasontoshare.com.
