Making Connections FAQ
What is Making Connections?
Where are the Making Connections sites, and how were they selected?
How is Making Connections different from other initiatives that have sought to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children and families?
What results does Making Connections seek to achieve?
Why does Making Connections view these results as the most important ones?
What are the primary strategies the Making Connections sites are using to achieve the core results and address the above factors?
How do sites know if they're making progress toward achieving these results?
What is the role of neighborhood residents in the work of Making Connections?
What are some of Making Connections' major accomplishments so far?
How will the Making Connections sites sustain these results after the initiative ends?
What is Making Connections?
Making Connections is the flagship initiative of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's strategy to help children succeed based on the belief that the best way to improve outcomes for vulnerable children living in tough neighborhoods is to strengthen their families' connections to economic opportunity, positive social networks, and effective services and supports. Launched in 1999, Making Connections is a decade-long effort to demonstrate this theory in disinvested communities across the country, and in full partnership with residents, community-based organizations, local government and businesses, social service agencies, community foundations, and other funders.
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Where are the Making Connections sites, and how were they selected?
The 10 Making Connections sites are Denver, Colorado; Des Moines, Iowa; Hartford, Connecticut; Indianapolis, Indiana; Louisville, Kentucky; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Oakland, California; Providence, Rhode Island; San Antonio, Texa and Seattle (White Center), Washington. The initiative began with 22 sites selected by the Foundation based on a number of criteria and characteristics, including: a receptive policy environment; a history of strong partnerships across the public, private and nonprofit sectors; the presence of local partners with the ability and commitment to champion the family strengthening agenda and/or a history of working with the Foundation on its previous place-based system reform, community building, jobs and other initiatives. In 2002, the number of Making Connections sites was narrowed to the 10 that most demonstrated the capacity, energy, and will needed to achieve concrete results for children and families.
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How is Making Connections different from other initiatives that have sought to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children and families?
Deliberate strategies to strengthen families have historically been missing from efforts to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children. Many initiatives have overlooked families as co-producers of better futures for their kids. Others have not sought to mobilize the community resources - including resident leaders, public-private partnerships, and good data -- that can help families change tough neighborhoods into places where children thrive. And still more efforts, while well-intentioned, have lacked a hard focus on achieving and sustaining measurable, concrete results. In addition, Making Connections advances a two generation approach. Sites are working to connect parents to good jobs and asset building opportunities as well as ensuring that their young children benefit from better health care, quality early childhood services, and more intensive supports in the early grades. This sustained, simultaneous emphasis on families, economic opportunity, school success in early grades, and strengthening community capacity represents a significant departure from previous community change initiatives sponsored by Casey and other national and local funders.
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What results does Making Connections seek to achieve?
Making Connections works with its neighborhoods to make a measurable, positive difference for families and children, especially those who are most vulnerable because of language and cultural barriers, involvement in the criminal justice system, legal status, and low levels of literacy.
The core results sought through Making Connections are to increase the number of families in the initiative neighborhoods who:
- Have access to and take advantage of job opportunities that provide family-supporting wages and benefits and offer potential for advancement.
- Have access to opportunities and financial products that help increase their savings and build assets for economic success.
- Have and can ensure that their young children are healthy and prepared to succeed in school.
- Have strong social connections to one another and have opportunities to participate actively in the life of their community.
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Why does Making Connections view these results as the most important ones?
These specific results address disturbing, long-standing national trends in the well being of children and families living in poor, urban neighborhoods.
According to the National Survey of American Families, more than 14 percent of families living in central cities across the country have incomes below the federal poverty line, compared to less than 7 percent of families who live in suburbs. Other results from the survey showed that: Some 20 percent of central city children live in families where no adult is employed full-time, compared to about 11 percent of suburban children; nearly a third of central city residents report having difficulty affording food; about 15 percent say they struggle to pay rent and mortgages, and more than 20 percent are without health care insurance.
Door-to-door and telephone surveys funded by the Casey Foundation, as well as U.S. Census and other data, show that these national trends are mirrored in the Making Connections neighborhoods. Across all 10 sites, for example, there is an average gap of about 20 percent between the initiative neighborhoods and the surrounding county in the number of households where no adults are employed full time. There are similar disparities showing up for two-income households and the number of young adults who are employed.
The initiative's core results also seek to address the array of factors that contribute to family vulnerability, including low levels of job skills, literacy, and educational attainment, as well as criminal records, language barriers and the legal status of many immigrant and refugee families. In many of the Making Connections neighborhoods, a pattern of disinvestment also limits opportunity. Jobs have moved from the inner-city to the suburbs without the training, transportation, and other supports needed to help residents follow them. Banks and major retailers also have relocated. Urban schools, infrastructure, and core city services receive less public investment, and housing stocks have declined and/or become unaffordable to low-income families.
Too many families in the Making Connections neighborhoods live in an on-going state of financial crisis because of limited opportunities to build assets and wealth. It has become increasingly well documented by the Casey Foundation and other groups that, because of little choice and competition within their neighborhoods, the poor pay substantially more for goods and services than do residents of more affluent communities. Mainstream banks have been replaced by fringe financial institutions, like payday lenders, who charge high fees for basic transactions, and predatory lenders often target low-income homeowners with high interest rate mortgages and refinancing scams.
In all of the Making Connections neighborhoods, many young children are falling behind in their physical, cognitive, and social development because their families lack access to quality prenatal, health, and child care, and because schools are not equipped to meet the special needs of vulnerable children.
Social isolation, as well as structural barriers related to race and immigration status, contribute to and compound family poverty. Too many disadvantaged children and families have too few connections to the kind of informal social networks that help most of us find jobs, child care, health services, and other supports. Families also are disconnected from schools, child welfare and juvenile justice systems, social service agencies, local government, and other institutions. This gives them little, if any, say in how to improve services, much less the ability to advocate for needed changes in policy and practice.
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What are the primary strategies the Making Connections sites are using to achieve the core results and address the above factors?
An emerging lesson from this initiative is the need to develop and strengthen within the Making Connections neighborhoods "pipelines" and "pathways" to jobs, assets, and supports that will help ensure children are healthy and prepared to succeed in school. Sites have worked with a broad range of local partners, including employers, banks, city government, community-based groups, local funders, schools, and others, to launch prototypes of these strategies. For example:
- All sites are building workforce pipelines from the initiative neighborhoods to regional economic engines -- such as health care and the construction trades - to increase family earnings and income. These pipelines have a neighborhood-focused approach to job recruitment, referrals, employer partnerships, career training, retention, and advancement services. The pipelines also put special emphasis on training and job development strategies for highly vulnerable populations, such as formerly incarcerated persons, Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) recipients, residents of public housing and immigrant and refugee families who need English as a Second Language (ESL) programs. Sites also are using the federal Food Stamp Employment and Training (FSET) Program, which provides matching funds to state and local workforce agencies, to expand education and job placement programs for low income families.
- Sites are using similar strategies to help families build savings and accumulate assets. A range of local partners are developing neighborhood focused outreach, counseling and coaching efforts, coordinating access to the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), financial education, credit repair, and homeownership programs, and helping families set both short- and long-term goals. In addition, residents and other local partners are working together to combat predatory lending and attract new financial institutions, such as community credit unions, to the Making Connections neighborhoods.
- To close wide gaps in third grade reading scores between the Making Connections neighborhoods and the surrounding counties, site are coordinating a range of strategies along a pathway to promote healthy child development and success at school. Using a data-driven approach, sites "map backward" from the desired result of increasing third grade reading proficiency to identify the supports and services children and their families need on the way toward that goal. Once again, Making Connections emphasizes a family and neighborhood focus, mobilizing communities in support of quality early childhood development, and supporting parents as their children's first teachers and best advocates. In addition, these pathways to assuring that the children are healthy and prepared to succeed in school help focus community partners - including health and child care providers, schools, local early childhood initiatives (such as United Way's Success by Six campaign) and local businesses -- on specific steps along that pathway. These steps may include: (1) expanding access to health care; (2) increasing early childhood care and education services; (3) working with resident and parent leaders to help connect families to high quality child care providers, family literacy programs, and other resources; and (4) promoting successful transitions to schools, ensuring that schools are ready to teach in the early grades and children arrive ready to learn.
Helping families increase earnings and build assets, promoting resident engagement and strong social networks, and ensuring that children are healthy and prepared for success in school, are important results in and of themselves. Yet Casey believes strategies to achieve these results must overlap and reinforce one another to finally "turn the curve" on improving child and family outcomes in tough neighborhoods. For example, Making Connections sites are learning that many families with young children need not only access to quality childcare but also connections to job training, asset building, and career advancement programs. Many participants in the initiative's workforce efforts need connections to informal social networks that help them find out about job opportunities and training programs.
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How do sites know if they're making progress toward achieving these results?
All of the Making Connections sites are using a set of indicators to help them assess progress toward achieving the initiative's core results. These indicators measure the impact of employment and asset building strategies as well as site efforts to ensure that young children are healthy and prepared to succeed in school. Specifically, within the Making Connections neighborhoods, the indicators track the percentage of:
- Households with children who report earned income and one or more adults employed;
- Households with employer-provided family health benefits;
- Households with children who have accumulated savings;
- Children in preschool programs;
- Children assessed as ready for school;
- Children's attendance in the early grades; and
- Children reading at or above proficiency level in third or fourth grade.
Each site has set specific annual targets for closing the gaps that exist between the Making Connections neighborhoods and the surrounding city/county on each of these indicators. Sites are using data to identify the gap between results for children and families in Making Connections neighborhoods and results for children and families citywide or countywide. Once the gap is identified, sites set targets for the extent of the gap they believe can be closed over the remaining year of the initiative.
At the site level, local leaders translate this target for closing the gap into the number of neighborhood residents who have to obtain and retain employment in order to achieve these goals. Through the framework of "closing the gaps," sites are translating data about community needs into action. Many sites are implementing specific new programs, policies, and powerful community strategies that can reduce disparities and improve results for children and families.
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What is the role of neighborhood residents in the work of Making Connections?
Residents in the Making Connections neighborhoods must be engaged in and help drive the initiative if it is to succeed. Better results for children and families cannot be achieved, much less sustained over time, without authentic demand for change from the people who live, work, worship, and raise children in these communities. This is a fundamental tenant of the initiative, and one that is increasingly important as sites move to help resident leaders join with other local partners to advocate for changes in funding, social services, and policies that impact disadvantaged children, families. and neighborhoods. Since the start of the initiative, the Making Connections sites have advanced strategies to help residents build the skills, use the data, and form the relationships with other local partners that allow them to take action on behalf of their communities, lift up their voices, and participate in local decision-making. These strategies include leadership development programs, engaging residents as "trusted advocates" who help their neighbors and friends get connected and involved, funding small grants that help spark neighborhood change, and "Time Dollar" programs in which residents provide goods and services to each other through civic work.
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What are some of Making Connections' major accomplishments so far?
Making Connections is about demonstrating to policymakers, elected officials, community leaders, other foundations and funders that there are better ways to work toward improving the odds for disadvantaged children and families living in tough neighborhoods. The initiative already has yielded lessons about building strong partnerships, developing powerful strategies, and measuring progress toward results. More importantly, much of this learning is backed up by "on the ground" success that sites already can point to:
- In 2007, more than 3500 residents of the Making Connections neighborhoods were trained and placed in jobs. More than 40 percent of those placements provided health benefits, almost double the national rate for entry-level jobs
- In 2007, campaigns in each of the Making Connections sites to increase access to federal earned income and child care tax credits have returned more than $31 million in refunds to residents.
- More than 2300 residents opened savings accounts and many are enrolled in financial education, credit repair, and home ownership programs.
- Sites have launched strategies to reach large numbers of children in Making Connections neighborhoods with little or no formal pre-school education. These include evidence-based models such as "play and learn" which engage families in a range of pre-school education activities, as well as strengthening family, friend, and neighbor care providers to improve child care quality in the initiative neighborhoods. In addition, most sites are working with a "focus school" to generate evidence that 3rd grade reading scores can be improved for neighborhood children when a complete array of research-tested interventions are put in place - including in-classroom literacy and after-school activities, increased parent engagement, and pre-school experiences to that focus on early literacy.
- Making Connections has built the capacity of dozens of community-based organizations, investing in their ability to use good data, strengthen resident leadership programs, and set baselines, targets, and performance measures for achieving results.
In addition to directly impacting children, families and neighborhoods, the Making Connections sites also are influencing the policy and practice of local government, financial institutions, schools and other partners. These include re-design of local workforce system, enactment of community benefit agreements that are providing hundreds of new job opportunities for neighborhood residents, credit repair and driver's license re-instatement programs, the opening of credit union branches, expansion of child health insurance programs, and helping local and state initiatives promote quality child care and early education programs.
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How will the Making Connections sites sustain these results after the initiative ends?
Making Connections sites have convened residents and other local partners to develop long-term sustainability plans. In most sites, this involves transitioning local management of Making Connections from site teams of Foundation staff and consultants to high-capacity organizations committed to the initiative's insistence on results, central roles for residents in the work, and using data to track and measure progress. These "Local Management Entities" (LMEs) will be supported by the Casey Foundation and an array of community partners in work to increase family income, assets, and success in early grades. LMEs also will assure residents help shape and set strategic priorities, have seats at decsion making tables that guide the work, and helped deepen the reach and impact of strategies to achieve and sustain results. And local entities will be fully engaged in efforts to take result strategies to scale using evidence generated at the neighborhood level to influence policy, practice and system change.
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Learn More
- Find Making Connections locations on the interactive Casey Places map.
- Read about the lessons learned from Making Connections and find other resources related to this initiative.