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:

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 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 best to 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 modeling for early care and education systems.

Children's Funding Project can assist state advocates with 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 generate the revenue needed to meet their goals.

Work with them to explore and prioritize revenue generating 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 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.

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

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

Additional Alliance-funded support for state advocacy includes the following:

Ongoing network programming on revenue generation. Revenue and finance are crucial pieces of early care and education advocacy. Children’s Funding Project provides 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 early care and education 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.