We partner with schools, organizations, agencies, and foundations that share our commitment to helping children become their best selves.
Highlights is a mission-driven company with an 80-year legacy of creating joyful learning experiences for children and moments that matter between children and the adults who nurture them. We believe children are the world’s most important people and that when they are surrounded by engaged adults, they grow into curious, creative, caring, and confident learners.
Highlights Early Learning extends this mission to children ages 0 to 5, along with the families and educators who care for them. Partnerships allow us to deepen that impact.
We work closely with our partners to understand their priorities and design solutions that align with their goals while advancing our shared commitment to children, families, and early childhood educators and support networks.
We partner with schools, organizations, agencies, and foundations that share our commitment to helping children become their best selves.
Partnerships
Together with our partners, we expand access to meaningful, playful learning and family engagement during the critical early childhood years—reaching more children and supporting the caring adults around them.
Who We Work With
We work with organizations that serve children and families and are looking to deepen their impact.
Our Partners Include:
- Early learning agencies and coalitions
- School districts and networks
- Nonprofits and foundations focused on children and families
- Companies with a shared commitment to early childhood
If you are working to improve the lives of young children or strengthen connections between them and the adults who care for them, we'd love to talk. We're always interested in exploring how we can do more together.
How We Work Together
Every partnership is forged around a shared goal: better lives and more hopeful futures for children.
We approach partnerships as collaborative relationships. We work closely with you to understand your audience, priorities, and desired outcomes and then identify the best way to move that work forward.
In many cases, this involves adapting existing Highlights content and products to fit your needs. When it makes sense, we can also assemble or tailor resources from across our portfolio to serve a specific initiative or audience.
Our role is to bring thoughtful, flexible solutions grounded in what we know about how young children learn best—through play, connection, joy, and meaningful interaction.
What We Help Make Possible
Our work with partners often supports:
- Play-based learning for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers
- Kindness learning and social-emotional development
- Kindergarten readiness
- Stronger connections between classrooms and home
- Family engagement through simple, accessible resources
- Early brain development during the critical 0–5 years
- Everyday moments that build confidence, curiosity, and a love of learning
Select Partnerships: Success Stories
Early Learning Coalition of Polk County, Florida
Determined to prepare preschoolers for a strong start, leaders from Florida’s Early Learning Coalition of Polk County sought input from kindergarten teachers. Kindness, they shared, is foundational to kindergarten readiness.
Polk partnered with Highlights to equip every Pre-K classroom with kindness learning resources and thousands of families with custom cover-wrapped High Five magazines—strengthening the ELC’s Kindergarten Bridge initiative and the home-school connection.
Read more about this partnership here: Planting Seeds of Kindness: A New Chapter of Kindergarten Readiness for the Early Learning Coalition of Polk County, FL
ELC Polk teachers excited to receive their Kindness Connections kits and custom cover-wrapped High Five magazines to send home with families. The day included a professional development session with our early learning expert.
Early Learning Coalition of Manatee County, Florida
Reaching families with timely, useful information isn’t easy. Emails are often missed, and flyers can get lost in the shuffle. When the Florida’s Early Learning Coalition of Manatee County discovered our custom cover-wrapped High Five magazines, they saw a more effective way to engage families and relay important information.
Manatee first used a co-branded cover-wrap to promote voluntary Pre-K (VPK) enrollment. Together, we designed a solution that paired their messaging with a magazine children value and families keep. The inside covers were tailored to highlight VPK opportunities, helping raise awareness through a magazine that not only bonds adults and children through playful learning but also invites repeat use.
Building on that success, Manatee expanded our partnership to address a second priority: helping families nurture early literacy at home—something all families care about but may be hesitant to ask how to achieve. We created a cover-wrap featuring accessible, practical tips that families could use right away.
Together, we have continued to create cover-wraps based on Manatee’s goals and the needs they see in their communities. The magazines have proven an effective tool for Manatee to share important information with families—from tips for healthy habits at home to hurricane preparedness and more—through a format that is both useful and genuinely enjoyed by families and children alike.
Learn more about custom High Five cover-wraps here.
Custom front and back covers, and custom inside front and back covers
Together with ELC Manatee, we designed this custom High Five cover-wrap about their “Transition 2 K” initiative to ensure every child starts kindergarten confident and ready to learn. The inside front and back covers feature simple, practical tips for families to build essential school-ready skills.
New Worlds Reading
Highlights partners with New Worlds Reading to help expand access to high-quality, engaging reading experiences for young children and their families. Through this collaboration, Highlights provides thoughtfully curated and totally custom content designed to spark curiosity, build foundational literacy skills, and support meaningful moments of connection between children and caregivers.
Together, the partnership reaches families at scale, delivering resources that make reading both accessible and enjoyable at home. By combining Highlights’ trusted, play-based approach with New Worlds Reading’s statewide reach, the collaboration helps more children develop the skills and confidence they need to become lifelong readers.
Gardner Media
How can we offer more kindness learning opportunities in classrooms and then help families reinforce it at home? This is the question we asked ourselves when exploring a partnership with Gardner Media, children's book publishers and wholesale distributors.
Like Highlights, Gardner Media is a family-owned company. Like us, their team is passionate about family-engaged learning and helping foster as many of those moments that matter, where caring adults connect with kids and nurture their confidence and self-worth.
Together, we curated a suite of 10-book bundles across a range of age groups from zero to five that show kindness through story. For each bundle, we then created a Teacher Guide for classrooms and a Grown-up Guide to go home with families to complete our Building Kindness Through Children’s Literature offering. Both guides include prompts that adults can ask as they read with their little ones to help them ponder, understand, and desire to show kindness, as they also build essential literacy skills.
The guiding principle behind our corporate partnerships is no different from that of our early childhood school, foundation, and agency partnerships: Shared values and commitment to helping all children become their best selves must come first. Then the sky’s the limit in terms of how, together, we can reach more children and the caring adults in their lives.
