The Annie E. Casey Foundation launched its Family-Centered Community Change® (FCCC) initiative with a goal of integrating two-generation strategies into existing place-based community initiatives. The innovative effort, which ran from 2012 to 2019, focused on supporting local partners in three neighborhoods with low economic resources: Buffalo, New York; Columbus, Ohio; and San Antonio, Texas.
Over the course of the initiative, the sites worked to promote the healthy development and academic success of children while simultaneously delivering adult services focused on parenting and financial stability. In year three, the community partners also received training and technical assistance — provided by the Casey Foundation — aimed at enhancing racial and ethnic equity and inclusion.
The Urban Institute conducted a formative evaluation of this effort, which included: 1) qualitative data collection from interviews and focus groups with partner staff and participants; 2) descriptive analysis of program data; and 3) a cost study.
Over the course of the grant period, each FCCC community progressively increased the number of new participants — both adults and children — until they peaked in 2016 or 2017.
The three communities reported numerous hurdles to providing child services as part of a two-generation approach. Challenges included: limited quality services, not targeting services to participating children, and not integrating child-serving organizations into the broader partnerships.
All three communities provided early care and education activities — often considered the most critical service in two-generation intervention — for at least some young children in participating families.
In the grant period, the interventions were not strong enough to move a large share of longtime community members out of poverty or counter the exclusionary changes wrought by gentrification.
All three sites benefited from their involvement in FCCC, according to the Urban Institute’s evaluation. By the end of 2019, community grantees had enhanced their partnerships, developed new coaching and family supports and built out existing single-generation services for participating families. Grantees also reported developing new cultures of data sharing and new models of delivering services while improving both the quality of and access to early care and education.
The evaluation also identified areas of opportunity — including more thoroughly integrating key principles of racial and ethnic equity and more authentically engaging the communities involved.
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