New Evidence2Success Video Highlights Shifting Public Financing to What Works

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.”