I spent time this past week listening to nonprofit colleagues across the country who are sharing stories about how they are helping and learning from their national staff, their affiliates, local partners or schools, and the local staff, youth, and families they serve as they all adjust to this new normal.  The stress on this sector is real, but the responses are incredible as many of these organizations scramble to help families and schools figure out what happens when out-of-school time is all the time.

In Puebla, a city of about 1.5 million people in central Mexico, there’s a school with a name that may only sound familiar to people from southeast Michigan. With a combination of active, experiential learning, a strong focus on social and emotional skills, and opportunities for building connections with land and community, Colegio Ypsilanti has been providing high-quality education to children and youth from preschool through high school for the past 35 years.

Close your eyes and imagine what an outstanding school looks and sounds like. What comes to mind? Young people collaborating and solving problems together? Or everyone at a desk memorizing facts for an upcoming test?

The Opportunity Index uses 20 indicators across four dimensions to provide users with a numerical measurement of opportunity across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. The four dimensions of community well-being are: the economy, education, health, and community. To better understand how each dimension and its indicators help to craft this unique score, the Forum will take a deep dive into each, identifying its impact on opportunity, implications for change, and policies that could help communities move forward.

There’s a growing consensus in the youth-serving field of the vital importance of social and emotional learning (SEL) for young people. Research over many years suggests that preparing children to be caring, ethical, contributing adults requires supporting them to develop social and emotional skills. These skills include focusing and deploying attention, understanding and managing emotions, empathizing with and respecting others, navigating social conflicts effectively, and standing up for principles of justice and fairness.

The City of Seattle and King County are now testing a new housing intervention called the Creating Moves to Opportunity (CMTO) project. CMTO tests a more personalized response to the proven idea that place matters for children and that moving young people to neighborhoods of higher opportunity can lead to positive economic, health and education outcomes. This blog will examine the research that informed this project, the promising results that Seattle and King County have demonstrated so far, and how this body of research has equity implications for both program design and research.

In September, the Forum's President & CEO Karen Pittman spoke with Camille Farrington, one of the chief architects of the Foundations for Young Adult Success framework, to explore how the framework remains critical to our efforts to put children and youth at the center and address equity.

More than a year has passed since the federal government announced its goal of developing a comprehensive strategy for using and managing data to deliver on mission, serve customers, and steward resources while respecting privacy and confidentiality. Now the government has released a draft year-one action plan and is seeking public input on its scope and content. This blog includes our organization's submitted comments on the Federal Data Strategy.

High-quality preschool is the gift that keeps on giving. At least that’s what Nobel Prize-winning economist Jim Heckman’s research shows. The IQ scores of the 123 low-income children who attended Perry Preschool in Ypsilanti, Mich., did not improve significantly as was hoped.

In January 2019, on the heels of gubernatorial elections, twenty new governors assumed office in states across the country, bringing with them new policies, priorities, and people. One critical and under-recognized area of impact? State-level children’s coordinating bodies--often known as children’s cabinets--which bring together state and sometimes private agencies whose work promotes the wellbeing of children and youth. Moreover, some state legislatures have recently taken action on children’s cabinets. Half a year into these new administrations, where do states stand?

More than a year has passed since the federal government announced its goal of developing a comprehensive strategy for using and managing data to deliver on mission, serve customers, and steward resources while respecting privacy and confidentiality. Now the government has released a draft year-one action plan and is seeking public input on its scope and content. This blog summarizes the draft year-one action plan and explains how members of the public, researchers, interest groups, and state and local policymakers can offer feedback.