Tackling the achievement gap is one of the toughest problems in early education. Co-founders Executive Director and education expert Dr. Uri Treisman and Jackie McCaffrey, Deputy Director at The University of Texas at Austin, along with key advisor Dr. Gay Su Pinell of Ohio State University, took on that challenge. The program they imagined would leverage the human capital of AmeriCorps to deliver early literacy interventions that could put children in low-income schools on a path for lifelong success. We are grateful to the indispensable roles co-founder Jackie McCaffrey and Sue Constable and Bryan Murdock, early directors of the program, played in the creation of what is now Literacy First.