Children's Funding Project

Children’s Funding Project helps communities and states expand equitable opportunities for children and youth through strategic public financing.

Children’s Funding Project can assist state advocates in identifying and leveraging existing funding, creating strategic financing plans, generating new revenue, and developing collaborative infrastructure to administer funds in a coordinated and equitable fashion.

Our state allies can call on Children’s Funding Project to:

Lead them through an early care and education fiscal mapping process.

Children's Funding Project has developed a suite of tools and best practices to coach state advocates on the process of fiscal mapping, or identifying the existing funds that support children’s services. Fiscal mapping provides the background research that is needed to improve the way a state finances their services and supports. This can be accomplished by generating new revenue, aligning funding streams and budget holders working towards similar goals, and holding policy makers accountable to commitments they’ve made.

Help them with cost modeling for early care and education systems.

Children's Funding Project can assist state advocates in cost modeling to determine the true cost of their ideal system for early care and education. Once equipped with this true cost estimate, advocates can start planning and working towards generating the revenue needed to meet their goals.

Work with them to explore and prioritize strategic financing plans.

Once advocates have an estimate of the amount of money needed to finance an ideal early care and education system, Children's Funding Project can help determine what revenue generation strategies are sufficient and feasible in their state to finance the various parts of that system.

Provide support and guidance on federal COVID-19 relief dollars.

CFP has developed expertise in COVID-19 relief dollar appropriations and how states are using their funds. CFP can help states identify dollars from the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (ARP) and the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations Act of 2021 (CRRSAA) that have landed or will be landing in their state or locality. This includes identifying potential funding streams within the relief packages that states can use to meet specific early childhood goals. Children's Funding Project can also help pinpoint the state, local and school district contacts that are best positioned to influence the administration of new COVID-19 relief dollars.

Additional Alliance-funded support for state advocacy includes:

Ongoing network programming on revenue generation. Revenue and finance is a crucial piece of ECE advocacy, and Children’s Funding Project continues to provide webinars, materials, and basic overview education for the Alliance network.
Curating the Alliance’s Revenue and Financing Resource Center. This online resource center is a one-stop repository of tools, papers, and other resources on ECE finance topics, including cost modeling, revenue options, and message framing. The resource center also contains a continuously updated collection of state successes in generating new revenue.