Key areas of work include public benefits, infant-early childhood mental health and parent mental health, Part C Early Intervention, child welfare, early care and education quality, and parenting supports. National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) can provide analyses of policy and policy implementation, research and responsive support.
State allies can call on NCCP to:
NCCP can provide state-specific options for improving policies that reduce families’ economic hardship, including TANF and SNAP, and promote families economic mobility by reducing public benefit cliffs. NCCP’s family economic supports (FES) responsive support includes analysis of state policies and modeling of benefits that can result from reforms, provision of examples from other states, and exploration of messaging and evidence that can help make the case for stronger FES supports for families with young children.
NCCP has done extensive research on states’ design, financing, and implementation of policies and programs that support infant-early childhood mental health across systems, and can provide research and TA in these areas.
NCCP works with states on policies that help ensure infants’ and toddlers’ access to Part C Early Intervention Services, and strengthen the financing and quality of services.
NCCP partners with state advocates, policymakers, and other stakeholders to conduct research on ECE programs’ use of exclusionary practices and design effective policies that include easily accessible supports for ECE programs, monitoring, and attention to eliminating disparities related to children’s race and special needs.
Additional Alliance-funded support for state advocacy includes:
This resource, posted online and maintained yearly, provides a two-generation view of current policies in each state affecting children birth through age eight. The profiles give crucial visibility into each state’s progress in early care and education, health, and parenting and family economic supports. The resource also includes evidence summaries for each policy benchmark and links to current policy reports relevant to each policy.
On the Ground:
In Rhode Island, NCCP is working with community leaders to develop a benefit guidelines dashboard for mixed-status families’ access to the full range of early care and economic security programs, in the context of changing rules on public charge for immigrant and mixed-status families.
In Maine, NCCP is presenting information from agencies and communities alongside data on changing WIC participation to encourage and support local strategies for access to nutritional support for women, infants, and children.
NCCP is engaging state leaders and advocates in Minnesota, New York, and Delaware, to consider ways to strengthen ECE programs’ access to effective quality supports; through this engagement, partners examine the results of surveys, landscape analyses, and reviews of state data that suggest options for improving ECE access to and use of research-informed quality supports such as coaching and early childhood mental health consultation.
