Children's Early Start Initiative was a special funding program conducted from 1996 to 2006, established through the DadeFund, Inc., a supporting organization of the Foundation. Children's Early Start awarded grants to support programs that helped caregivers - parents, guardians, child-care providers and other groups serving families with infants and toddlers - to foster the appropriate cognitive, emotional, and social development of at-risk children birth to three years of age.

The Children's Early Start Initiative was built on the recognition that parents and other primary care givers are babies' first teachers and that working parents increasingly must rely on other child-care and service providers to care for their infants and toddlers. During its 10 years of grantmaking, the program helped to launch and expand numerous community-based projects. They created opportunities at the neighborhood level for parents and caregivers to increase their knowledge and abilities and to improve the quality of child-care programs and the lives of the infants and toddlers in their care.