Abigail Seldin - Creative Philanthropy: Catalyzing a New Way to Help Parents Attend College - Part 1

It was a win-win solution, hiding in plain sight. Community colleges could serve more parents with young children if parents had easier access to affordable childcare. Head Start Centers, for their part, want to serve more families. Idea: If more community colleges could host Head Start Centers right on their campuses, eligible parents would have immediate access to free child care, colleges could better tap into a population of potential students, and Head Start centers could get free space and access to aspiring teachers. Abigail Seldin, founder of the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation, did what leanly staffed foundations are perfectly positioned to do - she saw the potential of a great idea and took the initiative to act on it. Abigail brought together the Association of Community College Trustees and the National Head Start Association, and engaged another small funder, the ECMC Foundation, to provide a modest but critical grant to design ways for more Head Start Centers to locate to community college campuses. The idea is already attracting enthusiastic support from community colleges, Head Start programs, Federal Government agencies, and other potential partners. In this podcast, Abigail explores how the idea and vision emerged, and the steps her small foundation took to help make it a reality. 

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Abigail Seldin is CEO of the Seldin/Haring-Smith Foundation (SHSF). Under her leadership, SHSF seeded Kids on Campus, a new effort with the National Head Start Association and Association of Community College Trustees to relocate Head Start centers to community college campuses. At SHSF, Abigail also launched a partnership with Getty Images to create new stock photos of today’s college students and published new data on transit inaccessibility that has generated bipartisan legislation. Abigail co-founded and sold a tech start-up and studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.