In 2025, Wisconsin made the largest early childhood investment in its history. The state legislature moved to put nearly $380 million into earlycare, education and literacy, including direct payments to providers, higher reimbursement rates, a new school readiness initiative, and a pilot to expand access for infants and toddlers. It had all the trappings of a great local story: a clear problem, a clear win, and a number big enough to matter.

But the investment itself is not the story. The story is what happened in the seven years before the vote.

From 2018 onward, a coalition of communities across Wisconsin built relationships, agreed on a shared agenda, and invested in the unglamorous work of advocacy. Leaders testified at finance committee hearings; they brought more than 50 community members to Madison for a childcare advocacy day; they held dozens of meetings with lawmakers from both parties. By the time a political window opened in 2025, the result of this work was that they walked in with not only a clear proposal but also the relationships and broad support needed to carry it through. The win that might have appeared sudden or circumstantial to an outsider was in reality anything but.

In the social impact sector, we devote decades and enormous amounts of energy to debating which policies help children thrive, but spend far less time talking about and investing in the civic infrastructure — the relationships, shared priorities, and advocacy muscles — required to make those policies political reality. It is the work we rarely see, but that  so often decides whether a good idea becomes an enduring result. When we underfund it, the cost is that good ideas never find a political window, and hard-won wins quietly unravel with the next election or budget cycle.

 As the columnist David Brooks has observed, “trust is built and the social fabric repaired when people form local relationships around shared tasks.” That is civic infrastructure, and I think of it much the same way I think of physical infrastructure: like roads and bridges, it connects people and institutions across a community. Also like roads and bridges, it does not build or maintain itself —it falls apart when no one is responsible for holding it together.

That matters because the systems shaping a child’s life do not belong to any single sector: they run across schools, employers, healthcare, housing, philanthropy, and government, which means no one actor can fix them alone. A great school cannot, on its own, guarantee a young person a path to a good job. A generous funder cannot, on their own, change a state budget. The work moves only when these actors align around a shared goal and stay aligned long enough to see it through.

That political infrastructure is what place-based partnerships exist to create. They are not another program layered on top of existing efforts; they are the connective tissue that enables institutions to work in coordination rather than in parallel. In practice, they build the relationships that outlast any single leader or grant, create shared data systems that allow partners to act on evidence rather than instinct, and translate what works on the ground into the policy and funding decisions made far above it.

Wisconsin’s early childhood investment win is a story to feel good about, but the lesson is not Wisconsin’s alone. A single place can take years to learn how to build this kind of organized infrastructure, and the reason to connect communities in a network is so that learning does not have to start over each time. 

This is precisely the work being championed across the StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network: Helping communities to build civic infrastructure, share what they learn more effectively, and then turn that hard-won progress into a starting point rather than a one-time event.

We are now applying that same logic to the years between high school and a good job, the stretch where early investments either build into lasting opportunity or quietly lose their force. Through the Pathways Impact Fund, we are backing regional organizations that connect K-12 systems, higher education, and employers so young people graduate with a real path forward rather than a patchwork of disconnected programs. The premise is the one Wisconsin proved: outcomes change when the system is connected by design, and someone is responsible for keeping it connected.

So what can the people who shape these systems do to create this infrastructure most effectively? 

To funders: Some of the most durable returns come from the least visible investments. It is tempting to fund the program you can point to and photograph, but the partnership that aligns a dozen institutions and survives a change in leadership is what makes those programs add up to something. Fund the connective tissue, not only the parts that are easy to see. Civic infrastructure should be treated as a core impact investment, not an ancillary expense. 

To policymakers: The communities doing this best are not asking you to design solutions from the capital. They are asking you to listen to what is already working on the ground, and to lock it in so progress does not vanish with the next election or the next budget cycle. Policy is what makes a win permanent.

And to community leaders: This work is slow, often invisible, and rarely produces a clean headline until the very end. Do it anyway. The relationships you build this year are why a window will open a few years from now, and why you will be ready when it does.

Wisconsin’s $380 million investment in early childhood education did not start with a vote; it started years earlier, with people in a room deciding to build something together. That is the civic infrastructure — the invisible highway — that we cannot see, and the lesson reaches well past one state. When we treat these partnerships like the roads and bridges they resemble, and invest in them accordingly, good ideas stop depending on luck and start becoming lasting results.

NationSwell publishes perspectives from leaders across our community to encourage discussion and advance new ideas. The views expressed are those of the author.