In 1995 at the U.N.’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, Hillary electrified the audience and women the world over with the declaration “Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights.” Her fifteen-year-old daughter was one of the young women paying close attention. So I wasn’t surprised when Hillary, after four years as secretary of state, wanted to join the foundation and work with Chelsea on projects to support women and girls, families, and childrearing.
In 2014, they launched No Ceilings, a partnership with Melinda French Gates and the Gates Foundation to collect, analyze, and publicize data on the status of girls and women since 1995 and to identify actions that could produce more rapid and measurable progress. I had seen Melinda working with women on health issues in a small African village. Her ability to listen to, communicate with, and move them was impressive. So was her willingness to invest in this project which could educate and motivate a large number of others to join her crusade for empowerment and equality.
A year later at the Best Buy Theater in New York, Melinda, Hillary, and Chelsea released the results of their work. No Ceilings: The Full Participation Report was an analysis of 850,000 data points on the status of women and girls over the past twenty years in 190 countries. The report showed remarkable progress in health and education, with maternal mortality cut almost in half since 1995, and the gender gap in primary school enrollment and completion almost eliminated. It also showed much less positive change in women’s security, economic opportunities, and presence in public and private leadership roles. Not surprisingly, it revealed in specific terms what we all know: that the gains had not been equally shared because of natural and human barriers, including geography, income, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability, and cultural norms.
Perhaps the most important thing No Ceilings did was to make its findings understandable and interesting to a much larger audience. Even though the Full Participation Report was available for download in six languages, only already knowledgeable and committed people were likely to read it. So an easily accessible website, NoCeilings.org, was designed to reach anyone who was interested, with clear visualizations of the information and compelling videos of stories of women and girls across the globe.
The announcement event showcased national and community leaders who were working to advance full participation of women and girls, including two female presidents and other women trailblazers working all over the world. The event generated a lot of press coverage for the report and its companion, The Full Participation Plan, with policy priorities for leaders and activists. There was also a lot of interest in the ad campaign released at the same time, showing all the ways in which women were “Not There.” One hundred thirty-two people per minute accessed it on release day and eventually there were 283 million impressions on Twitter alone.
From 2014 through 2016, No Ceilings forged new partnerships and specific commitments through the Clinton Global Initiative. In 2014 the focus was on increasing educational attainment through high school and beyond. Hillary and the lead partner, the Collaborative for Harnessing Ambition and Resources for Girls’ Education (Girls CHARGE), led by former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard, announced that thirty partners had committed $600 million to the effort. For example, Nepal committed to giving girls bicycles to make sure they could get to and from school safely. BRAC, the huge Bangladeshi NGO with 90,000 employees in twelve countries already helping more than 100 million people gain access to healthcare, education, and microfinancing, promised to establish 8,000 clubs to provide safe spaces for adolescent girls. The Clinton Foundation’s job was putting folks like this in touch with big companies and other donors who could help them reach their goals.
In 2016 at the CGI Annual Meeting, Chelsea announced that No Ceilings, along with thirty NGOs, private sector and charitable partners led by Vital Voices and WEConnect International, would invest $70 million to help 900,000 women and girls in sixty countries to improve economic and leadership opportunities and reduce violence against women and girls. Our foundation had been working since 2015 to test this model in Haiti, with a Women’s Economic Participation project providing services, market opportunities, and investor prospects to help women-owned small businesses and agricultural cooperatives with more than 3,000 members. In late July, Chelsea took a delegation of potential investors and buyers to Haiti for a tour of the businesses we were supporting and a larger meeting to visit more potential partners.
Another of Hillary’s and Chelsea’s initiatives, Too Small to Fail (TSTF), was launched long before its formal beginning. In 1972, Hillary took a fourth year in law school to work at the Yale Child Study Center and immersed herself in early childhood education programs in the U.S. and other countries. Her first job out of law school was with Marian Wright Edelman and the Children’s Defense Fund. Then, when I became governor, she brought to our state an ambitious preschool program from Israel, Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters, or HIPPY, an effort to give parents the instructions and materials to be their children’s first teachers. Hillary was convinced it could help develop children’s brains so they could start school with the skills to succeed, and independent evaluations proved that it did. By the time I ran for president, Arkansas had the largest HIPPY program in the country, serving 2,400 mothers and their children. We loved going to the graduation exercises where the kids showed their skills and the mothers were proud of their children and themselves.
By 2013, Chelsea, who was looking forward to becoming a mother herself, wanted to work with her mom to do more. And more had to be done. Almost 60 percent of U.S. children started kindergarten lagging behind their peers in critical language and listening skills. This slow start in brain development was graphically captured by the so-called word gap, the estimated 30 million fewer words that children from low-income, low-education households heard by the time they started school.
The simple idea that drove Too Small to Fail is the ability of all parents and other caregivers to change that by talking, reading, and singing to kids from infancy onward. TSTF’s job was to get that message to as many people as possible, along with the provision of basic instructions, learning materials, and easy opportunities to do it. I was amazed at how many partners Hillary and Chelsea found to help. In 2013, they brought together a large group of entertainment industry executives to encourage them to integrate messages about early brain and language development in their programs. Millions of viewers saw parents, often in tough circumstances, including incarceration, finding ways to talk, read, and sing to their kids.
In 2014, Univision, then owned by our friend and foundation supporter Haim Saban, joined the effort in a big way, across all its television, radio, and online media, and through the community outreach activities of its local affiliates. Their efforts reached tens of millions of Spanish-speaking viewers. The next year, Sesame Street joined in with a unique text-to-parents program with the free health information service Text4baby, which reached more than 820,000 parents.
Two thousand fifteen also brought some unique new partnerships. Shane’s Inspiration and Landscape Structures agreed to integrate TSTF’s “Talk, Read, Sing” message on panels and signs in their playgrounds. In 2017, I went to the dedication of a beautiful one at Sollers Point, in Dundalk, Maryland, near Baltimore. The park was located next to a branch of the Baltimore County Public Library and I had a nice visit with two opening day visitors, Danielle Gonzalez and her three-year-old daughter, Isabella. She told me that she visited the library at least twice a week and she was thrilled the park gave them a fun place to play and read. She told her story with quiet dignity, saying she married in her late thirties and had Isabella in her early forties. She and her husband decided they would both raise her to value learning and vowed both would read to her daily. Then, a few months earlier, her husband had passed away in his sleep. She knew she had to raise their daughter for both of them, and loved choosing books to read with her. She told me they read eight to ten books a day and smiled when she said she thought her husband would be proud. If every parent did half that, there wouldn’t be many kids unprepared to start school.
The second partner I got to see in action was the Coin Laundry Association. It started by providing customers with parent tip sheets and other materials in 5,000 laundromats, then offered free laundry days for parents to bring their kids to get the tip sheet, child activity pages, and books. Then a hundred of the laundromats built “Family Read, Play & Learn” spaces for parents and kids to use while the wash was tumbling. I visited two of them, one in New Orleans and the other in Deer Park on Long Island, New York. The laundromat owners had never imagined they could be in the child development business, but were clearly proud and a little amazed at how much it meant to the parents and the kids. Families that couldn’t afford an in-home washing machine were now able to spend time on something both profoundly important and fun. The Coin Laundry folks expect to have 500 more onsite play-and-learn spaces soon.
Over the last couple of years, TSTF’s appeal and obvious benefits generated more support. The American Academy of Pediatricians pitched in to provide books to families that came to their offices. Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Oakland, California, did their own outreach in places where parents spend time—including grocery stores, hospitals, and houses of worship. Miami launched its efforts in 2016 at a joint event cohosted with the White House and Invest in US to support the development of young dual-language learning. Now there are at least thirty-five cities and two states, New York and Michigan, doing their own version of very early learning.
Since its inception, TSTF has distributed more than 1.4 million books to families who need them, almost 200,000 through diaper banks alone. More than thirteen hundred literacy-themed parks have been launched. Univision’s campaign has amassed more than 800 million audience impressions and reached thousands of families directly through community events. Tens of millions of people have seen the Talk, Read, Sing messages in the TV shows that wrote them into the scripts. Sixteen independent academic studies have validated TSTF’s positive impact on children’s learning. It’s all part of the village, as Hillary said long ago, that can help parents in raising children to thrive.