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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.

Our 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.