This reflection by our Fall 2025 Member Meeting Planning Team Member Robyn Tedder is part of ECFC’s racial equity learning journey. Robyn’s words invite us to connect history, purpose, and early childhood systems through the lens of Montgomery.
What Montgomery Made Clear
By Robyn Tedder, CEO/Founder, Candor & Co Consulting; Project Director, Early Childhood Funder’s Alliance of Southwestern Pennsylvania.
I went to Montgomery anticipating history, and I left with a deeper connection to my purpose and calling.
At the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) museum and memorial, the distance between “then” and “now” collapsed. I am only three generations removed from my enslaved ancestors, and I learned my great-grandfather was likely one of only a few Black men counted in the post-emancipation census in Darlington, South Carolina, a fact that reshaped the visit from lesson to legacy.
I carried the weight of what my family endured, and a steady pride in what they built; holding both clarified my purpose.
Lessons for Early Childhood Systems What EJI makes undeniable is that progress is built by strategy, not sentiment. The civil rights victories we quote were coordinated efforts that aligned people, logistics, and resources, sustained across years and reinforced in living rooms like the Harris House, and every gain drew retaliation during and after Reconstruction, and again in the decades following the Voting Rights Act. I kept asking what it felt like to be a child in the middle of all that planning and risk, and the answer keeps guiding my work: children are never bystanders to policy; they are the point.
Children are never bystanders to policy; they are the point.
That through line is visible in early childhood systems today, where old tools persist with new names, where redlining’s map shows up as child care deserts, where reimbursement rates ignore the true cost of quality, where “neutral” rules land hardest on Black and rural providers. If we are serious about child well-being, investing in Black children and Black families is not charity, it is repair, and acknowledging this will move us closer to outcomes at scale.
During the pre-visit, we spent time at The Mothers of Gynecology Monument, a stop that affirmed why reproductive justice belongs in this work. Healthy babies begin with healthy, respected mothers. Access to quality maternal health services, bodily autonomy, and trusted care are the foundations of development.
Learning the stories of Anarcha, Lucy, and Betsey made this personal, and their names insist that our systems remember what was taken, and repair what we still control. The health of a newborn is braided to the safety and dignity of their mother, their neighborhood, and their history.
The Charge for Funders For funders, the charge is clear: adopt a reparative lens and invest across systems rather than in silos, because early childhood intersects with economic security, reproductive justice, environmental health, and every other social determinant of child well-being. Our history requires us to stay when the spotlight fades, anticipating the backlash we have seen since Reconstruction and after the Voting Rights Act, committing for the long arc, not the news cycle.
Early childhood intersects with economic security, reproductive justice, environmental health, and every other social determinant of child well-being.
Montgomery reminded me that alignment and intentional action move history, our sector knows how to do this, and Black communities have modeled it for generations. My commitment is to organize our work toward repair, to guide investments where the return is generational, and to measure success by what children and families experience, not by our spreadsheets, reporting or board cycles. I offer that commitment as an invitation to every funder and partner who believes, as I do, that our world is better when children thrive.
ECFC members can learn more about the Fall 2025 Member Meeting and Alabama Learning Tour, here >>>
This reflection by our Fall 2025 Member Meeting Planning Team Member Robyn Tedder is part of ECFC’s racial equity learning journey. Robyn’s words invite us to connect history, purpose, and early childhood systems through the lens of Montgomery.
What Montgomery Made Clear
By Robyn Tedder, CEO/Founder, Candor & Co Consulting; Project Director, Early Childhood Funder’s Alliance of Southwestern Pennsylvania.
At the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) museum and memorial, the distance between “then” and “now” collapsed. I am only three generations removed from my enslaved ancestors, and I learned my great-grandfather was likely one of only a few Black men counted in the post-emancipation census in Darlington, South Carolina, a fact that reshaped the visit from lesson to legacy.
Lessons for Early Childhood Systems
What EJI makes undeniable is that progress is built by strategy, not sentiment. The civil rights victories we quote were coordinated efforts that aligned people, logistics, and resources, sustained across years and reinforced in living rooms like the Harris House, and every gain drew retaliation during and after Reconstruction, and again in the decades following the Voting Rights Act. I kept asking what it felt like to be a child in the middle of all that planning and risk, and the answer keeps guiding my work: children are never bystanders to policy; they are the point.
That through line is visible in early childhood systems today, where old tools persist with new names, where redlining’s map shows up as child care deserts, where reimbursement rates ignore the true cost of quality, where “neutral” rules land hardest on Black and rural providers. If we are serious about child well-being, investing in Black children and Black families is not charity, it is repair, and acknowledging this will move us closer to outcomes at scale.
During the pre-visit, we spent time at The Mothers of Gynecology Monument, a stop that affirmed why reproductive justice belongs in this work. Healthy babies begin with healthy, respected mothers. Access to quality maternal health services, bodily autonomy, and trusted care are the foundations of development.
The Charge for Funders
For funders, the charge is clear: adopt a reparative lens and invest across systems rather than in silos, because early childhood intersects with economic security, reproductive justice, environmental health, and every other social determinant of child well-being. Our history requires us to stay when the spotlight fades, anticipating the backlash we have seen since Reconstruction and after the Voting Rights Act, committing for the long arc, not the news cycle.
Montgomery reminded me that alignment and intentional action move history, our sector knows how to do this, and Black communities have modeled it for generations. My commitment is to organize our work toward repair, to guide investments where the return is generational, and to measure success by what children and families experience, not by our spreadsheets, reporting or board cycles. I offer that commitment as an invitation to every funder and partner who believes, as I do, that our world is better when children thrive.
ECFC members can learn more about the Fall 2025 Member Meeting and Alabama Learning Tour, here >>>