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Transforming the Financing of Early Care and Education
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine released a report called Transforming the Financing of Early Care and Education. The 315 page document highlights the lack of access to high-quality early care and education for children in the United States, and proposes implementing a new financing structure to ensure that all children have the opportunity to access affordable education. The authors articulate their vision for a structure that will support the total cost of a high-quality ECE system. They hope the report will stimulate policy makers, practitioners, leaders, and all other ECE stakeholders to make the commitment to plan and implement the transformed and effective financing structure that we recommend here.
Tags: Early Childcare & Education (birth - 4), Evidence-based & Best Practice Resources, Tools and Tutorials
October 2, 2021
Logic Model Workbook
The Innovation Network’s Logic Model Workbook is a do-it-yourself guide to the concepts and use of a logic model. A logic model is a commonly-used tool to clarify and depict a program within an organization. You may have heard it described as a logical framework, theory of change, or program matrix—but the purpose is usually the same: to graphically depict your program, initiative, project or even the sum total of all of your organization’s work. It also serves as a foundation for program planning and evaluation. It describes the steps necessary for you to create logic models for your own programs. This process may take anywhere from an hour to several hours or even days, depending on the complexity of the program.
The Family Options Study
US Department of Housing and Urban Development, Office of Policy Development and Research conducted the Family Options Study, which is a multi-site, random assignment experiment designed to study the impact of various housing and services interventions for homeless families.
Tags: Evidence-based & Best Practice Resources, Families, Housing & Homelessness, Tools and Tutorials
Ready by 21
Ready by 21 increases the capacity of leaders to achieve collective impact for children and youth by providing standards, proven tools and solutions, and ways to measure and track youth success.
Tags: Anti-Poverty & Self-Sufficiency & Workforce Development, Children & Youth Development, College Preparation, Early Childcare & Education (birth - 4), Evidence-based & Best Practice Resources, K-12 Education, Tools and Tutorials
Afterschool Alliance
The Afterschool Alliance provides research, issue briefs, fact sheets, and an impact database on the impacts of afterschool programs. They seek to engage public will to increase public and private investment in quality afterschool program initiatives at the national, state and local levels.
Tags: Children & Youth Development, Evidence-based & Best Practice Resources, Introduction, K-12 Education
How to Talk to Funders about ROI
This Partnerships for Strategic Impact document breaks down how to talk to funders about ROI in two ways: 1) Understanding what data can and cannot tell you, and 2) Making data-informed, value-driven funding decisions.
Tags: Deeper Dive, ImpactStory Exclusive Resource, Storytelling Tips & Resources
What Impact? A Framework for Measuring the Scale and Scope of Social Performance
Leaders of organizations in the social sector are under growing pressure to demonstrate their impacts on pressing societal problems such as global poverty. This Social Enterprise Initiative, Harvard Business School working paper reviews the debates around performance and impact, drawing on three literatures: strategic philanthropy, nonprofit management, and international development. We then develop a contingency framework for measuring results, suggesting that some organizations should measure long-term impacts, while others should focus on shorter-term outputs and outcomes. In closing, we discuss the implications of our analysis for future research on performance management.
Tags: Deeper Dive, Evaluation Methods & Strategies, Storytelling Tips & Resources
Hiring an Evaluation Consultant
This Usable Knowledge white paper breaks down tips to hiring an evaluation consultant, thoughts about what to look for in an evaluation consultant and how to select and hire one for your next evaluation project.
Effective Partnerships
The Stanford Social Innovation Review breaks down how local governments and nonprofits can work together for large-scale community change using 5 steps of shared leadership.
Tags: Collaboration, Deeper Dive
Measuring Success How Robin Hood Estimates the Impact of Grants
Robin Hood fights poverty in New York City. The goal is to make grant decisions to maximize poverty-fighting impact, much like a financial manager chooses investments to maximize profit. The metrics project described in this manuscript has been designed to create just such a scorecard, showing ratios that guide investment decisions as financial rates and giving grants to programs that yield high benefit-cost ratios. Grant-making decisions rely on the detailed expertise of program officers as well as numerical calculations. Metrics are always under revision, a virtually never-ending project.
Tags: Data Collection & Analysis Tips & Resources, Deeper Dive, Nonprofit Metrics & Impact, Storytelling Tips & Resources
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