New Evidence2Success Video Highlights Shifting Public Financing to What Works - The Annie E. Casey Foundation

New Evidence2Success Video Highlights Shifting Public Financing to What Works

Posted August 13, 2016
By the Annie E. Casey Foundation
Blog fundmapping 2016

To help com­mu­ni­ties achieve bet­ter out­comes for their invest­ments on behalf of chil­dren, the Annie E. Casey Foun­da­tion and sev­er­al part­ners devel­oped Evidence2Success, which com­bines mul­ti­ple proven strate­gies into a uni­fied pre­ven­tion frame­work. Cen­tral to that frame­work are financ­ing strate­gies that help states and com­mu­ni­ties map cur­rent invest­ments and shift a por­tion of their fund­ing to evi­dence-based pre­ven­tion programs.

A new video, Evidence2Success: Tools for Fund-Map­ping the Future, shows how Evidence2Success sites in Alaba­ma, Rhode Island and Utah are pulling togeth­er local data to help com­mu­ni­ties bet­ter align resources with local­ly deter­mined pri­or­i­ty out­comes. Evidence2Success strate­gic financ­ing tools help com­mu­ni­ties bet­ter tar­get scarce resources and shift how they use pub­lic fund­ing to improve child well-being out­comes,” says Suzanne Barnard, direc­tor of Casey’s Evi­dence-Based Prac­tice Group.

Fund-map­ping allows Evidence2Success sites to ana­lyze both their cur­rent invest­ments in children’s ser­vices and the results those ser­vices are achiev­ing. Fund map­ping is a process of bring­ing togeth­er bud­get data, pro­gram data, admin­is­tra­tive data and eval­u­a­tion data to help peo­ple look at not just how much are we spend­ing, but what are we actu­al­ly buy­ing for those dol­lars and is what we are buy­ing get­ting us to our goals,” says Mar­garet Fly­nn-Kahn, a found­ing part­ner of Main­spring Con­sult­ing, which devel­oped a web-based fund-map­ping tool.

With mul­ti­ple agen­cies enter­ing data and pro­duc­ing analy­ses, com­mu­ni­ties can con­sid­er ways of redi­rect­ing resources from expen­sive, deep-end treat­ment pro­grams to front-end pre­ven­tion ini­tia­tives. Redi­rect­ing just 1% to 2% of dol­lars into proven pro­grams can make a mean­ing­ful dif­fer­ence in the well-being of chil­dren and fam­i­lies. Fund map­ping is a game chang­er for our com­mu­ni­ty,” says Jere­mi­ah Newell, chief oper­at­ing offi­cer of the Mobile Area Edu­ca­tion Foun­da­tion. We didn’t have that infor­ma­tion before.”

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