What results does Making Connections seek to achieve?

Making Connections works to make a measurable, positive difference for families and children living in the initiative neighborhoods, 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. For the past several years, 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 robust 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 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 most 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 that they believe can be closed over the remaining years 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. Absent authentic demand for change from the people who live, work, worship, and raise children in these communities, better results for children and families cannot be achieved, much less sustained over time. 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 – including funders, government officials, faith-based organizations and others – 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, funds for small grants that help spark neighborhood change, and “Time Dollar” programs in which residents provide goods and services to each other through civic work.

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 important, much of this learning is backed up by “on the ground” success that sites already can point to: 

• In 2005-06, more than 2100 residents of the Making Connections neighborhoods were trained and placed in jobs.
• During the past five years, campaigns in each of the Making Connections sites to increase access to federal earned income and child care tax credits have returned more than $9 million in refunds to residents.  
• Several sites have created informal networks that are reaching hundreds of “family, friend and neighbor” child care providers offering instructional materials and links to certification programs. 
• 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 licenses re-instatement programs, the opening of credit union branches, expansion of child health insurance programs, and helping local and state initiatives to 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?

Even though Making Connections is at its mid-point, sites are launching comprehensive strategies to ensure that the work is sustained well past the formal end of the initiative. During the past several years, most have convened residents and other local partners to develop sustainability plans. These involve transitioning local management of Making Connections from site teams of Foundation staff and consultants to local members  -- either new or existing high-capacity organizations committed to the initiative’s results. With support from the Casey Foundation, local management entities will be accountable for gathering data, convening partners, strengthening resident leaders, and providing technical assistance and other infrastructure needed to carry the work forward. Most sites will make this transition in 2007-08. In addition, sites are developing strategies to gather evidence from small, discrete groups of families in the Making Connections neighborhoods -- such as those living in a school catchment area – that can help demonstrate to elected officials, social service systems, policy makers and others why and how communities can change the way they “do business” when it comes to improving outcomes for children and families. These policy, advocacy, and influence agendas in sites are needed to expand and sustain site workforce strategies, asset building initiatives, efforts to help assure school success in early grades, community capacity to use data, develop leaders, commit to results, address racial disparity, and mobilize their agendas.

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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.