Nearly 400 public officials, educators, youth program leaders, nonprofit workers and funders from across the country gathered in February for the Better Together Conference in Baltimore.

Their mission: share lessons about building effective systems and encourage cities to better coordinate resources from multiple stakeholders.

A new report – Better Together: Building Local Systems to Improve Afterschool – summarizes the conference and features work that the Forum and the Weikart Center for Youth Program Quality are doing on program quality improvement. The conference was co-sponsored by the Forum for Youth Investment and four partners: the Wallace Foundation, the National League of Cities, the Collaborative for Building After School Systems and the American Youth Policy Forum.