This report aims to establish a profile of the children, families and communities participating in the Readiness to Learn in Minority Francophone Communities project (Readiness to Learn project), a demonstration project funded by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada (HRSDC). The project tests a preschool child care program, whose objective is to develop a child's language skills, knowledge and use of French, awareness of and identification with the francophone culture as well as favor his/her preparation for school and overall development. The program is evaluated using a quasi-experimental research design with non-equivalent comparison groups. The research design comprises three experimental groups: a program group made up of children enrolled in a francophone daycare centre offering the new preschool program; a comparison group consisting of children enrolled at a francophone daycare centre that does not offer the new program; and a comparison group of children who are cared for at home or in an informal family daycare setting. The first comparison group aims to control for the influence of a formal daycare centre on child development, a treatment in itself. The second comparison group controls for the influence of an informal care setting on child development. The project includes two participant cohorts--the first enrolled in 2007 and the second enrolled in 2008. The analyses presented in this report deal solely with data from the first cohort when children's mean age was three. Data were collected from May to December 2007, before and shortly after the program was implemented. The primary aim of the analyses is to establish the homogeneity of the experimental groups prior to the program's implementation. The causal inference resulting from a quasi-experimental research design is facilitated by the use of pre-intervention measures of the outcomes (i.e. different components of child development) and their associated correlates. These include parents' socio-demographic profile, family processes and community variables. The report also presents results of analyses comparing the socio-demographic and linguistic characteristics of the study participants with those of respondents in a national survey of the francophone minority. These analyses seek to establish the representativeness of study participants compared to francophone populations living in a minority context. (author abstract)