Blog

Photo used with permission from The California Endowment This guest blog, written by Traci Broady, The Annie E. Casey Foundation, offers participant reflections on a recent CSSP Learning, Equity, and Power (LEaP) session, "How Funders Can Help Build Community Power: Lessons from The California Endowment’s Building Healthy Communities Initiative.” Learn more about LEaP here and [...]

Under the banner “Learning, Equity, and Power” (LEaP), the Center for the Study of Policy (CSSP) hosted a series of conversations sharing insights from The California Endowment’s 10-year, 14 community Building Healthy Communities (BHC) initiative. This conversation about BHC was facilitated by Anand Sharma, CSSP Senior Associate, and featured Sandra Witt, Managing Director of Power [...]

“There's nothing like waking up and worrying if today they're going to turn a utility off or wondering how much time you have to come up with the money to prevent that from happening,” Patricia, a mother of four in Michigan told us. For her, economic security would mean “not having to beg and borrow [...]

It was a rainy Saturday along the Monterey Peninsula in October 2012, yet a line of adults, young people and small children snaked around the building and out to the parking lot. It was the Grand Opening of the Cesar Chavez Library, a $3.0-million project that renovated the existing library and expanded it with approximately [...]

“What do you actually need? How can I actually help?” These are the questions Nai Pharn, a Community Health Worker (CHW) at UCSF Benioff’s Children’s Hospital Oakland, found herself asking while meeting for the first time with an overwhelmed mother about renewing her CalFresh benefits. When the mother began getting teary-eyed, Pharn paused and asked [...]

For over 10 years, beginning in 2010, The California Endowment (TCE) invested $1.75 billion and partnered with 14 communities across California as well as many state-level organizations and alliances, on Building Healthy Communities (BHC), an innovative initiative to achieve more equitable health outcomes. During that period, BHC deployed communication and narrative change strategies more proactively [...]

Peer-reviewed journal articles can provide clear evidence of the effectiveness of new approaches to caring for children and families. This week, the DULCE team published an article in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics. This article–the first of several in the pipeline–presents CSSP’s evidence of the effectiveness of the DULCE cross-sector [...]

The central goal of a child allowance is to promote the health and well-being of children and families. By providing consistent and adequate income support, it can help families pay for immediate essentials, reduce the stress associated with struggling to make ends meet, and create a foundation for families to pursue their goals and aspirations. [...]

Photo courtesy of The California Endowment's Building Healthy Communities Initiative archive CSSP has a long history of designing, implementing, and evaluating community and system change efforts. One of the most significant challenges in such an undertaking is sustaining the investments and interest of funders over the long term that is needed to  achieve tangible results [...]

For decades, field leaders and funders have focused on developmental screening and kindergarten readiness as markers of child and family well-being. While those efforts have advanced a policy and community emphasis on Head Start, Universal Pre-K, and other efforts in early education, public officials have placed much less emphasis on the critical importance of foundational [...]