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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 help state advocates identify and leverage their existing funding, estimate how much money they need to achieve their goals, generate new revenue, and create comprehensive strategic public financing plans that develop collaborative infrastructure and administer funds in coordinated and equitable ways.

State allies can call on Children’s Funding Project for the following services:

Coach 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 fiscal mapping—the process of identifying a state’s existing funds that support children’s services. Fiscal mapping provides the background research necessary to improve the way a state funds its services and programs for kids. As part of this work, Children’s Funding Project advises states on how to use existing fiscal mapping tools and databases to assess the current funding landscape, align existing funding streams and budget holders to work toward similar goals, and hold policymakers accountable for state financial commitments they have made.

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

Children's Funding Project can help state advocates estimate the true cost of their ideal system for early care and education to define a funding need and achieve a goal. Children’s Funding Project can also create comprehensive cost models—dynamic tools that allow states to explore scenarios about the impacts of different policy or programmatic changes on the true cost of a program or service. Once equipped with true cost information from cost estimation or cost modeling, advocates can then pursue sufficient revenue to meet their goals.

Work with them to explore and prioritize revenue generation strategies.

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 plan. This can include research about available taxing options and emerging funding strategies in the state to generate new revenue.

On the Ground:

  • In Delaware, Children’s Funding Project completed cost estimation and modeling to allow local leaders to understand the true cost of a voluntary universal early care and education system for all Delaware families with young children. The final cost estimate included modeling a progressive parent contribution scale as well as a phased-in expansion of income eligibility for subsidized child care.
  • In Minnesota, Children’s Funding Project provided coaching on revenue generation strategies in preparation for the legislative session. This coaching included creating slides to present to legislators, examples from other states, contextualized data, and revenue options.

“Children’s Funding Project helped make our Future of Child Care working group a huge success! Their expertise, collaboration, and strategic thinking really made the partnership work—from the meetings and analysis to the decks and a poll. The team did a great job customizing the work to our context and needs and adding technical and strategic expertise. We have gotten compliments on their contributions and could not have done this without CFP.”

Madeleine Bayard, Senior Vice President, Rodel