SPARK

www.wkkf.org/spark

Working with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation on its SPARK Initiative, CCMC (as a resource organization) is helping to ensure that American children who start school each year are prepared to learn. SPARK is a six-year initiative built around Supporting Partnerships to Assure Ready Kids that unites communities so that all children can be successful in learning before and after they enter school. SPARK fosters partnerships of selected communities, schools, state agencies and families to ensure that they work together effectively for the early learning of children. With the initiative serving as a catalyst or “spark,” the goal is to ensure that vulnerable children are ready for school and that schools are ready for children.

The initiative is now at the midway point and has grantees in eight locations: District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina and Ohio.

SPARK is based on four key principles:

1. Strong partnerships among families, providers, community organizations and ready schools ensure that all children can learn and succeed in school.
2. Quality is a critical element of a child’s early learning, from birth through the early years of school.
3. Parents and families at home and working with early-care providers are critical to ensuring that children succeed in school.
4. School leaders and teachers, working with the community’s support, can create smooth transitions from early-learning settings so that children can succeed in school.

Children Family Work News

www.cfwnews.org

Children Family Work News (CFW) disseminates full-text articles on child welfare and low wage work issues from LexisNexis from more than 36,000 publications. CFW allows subscribers, including advocates, policymakers and journalists, to view full unedited text of recent news articles in one e-mail after they select the exact topics and geographical areas they are interested in. Users subscribed to child welfare topics receive clips every weekday while those subscribed to low wage work topics receive clips on Monday and Thursdays. CFW adds no text or commentary.

Fairness Initiative on Low-Wage Work

www.lowwagework.org

For generations, Americans shared a tacit understanding that if you worked hard, a livable income and basic securities would be yours. That promise has been broken. Today, more than 30 million men and women in this country work in jobs that pay poverty wages and provide few, if any, benefits.

To combat this situation, CCMC organized a national communications and advocacy effort with more than 20 organizations working on a range of issues related to low-wage work. We are shifting the public debate from stories concentrating on individual workers to a more systemic look at low-wage work. Through this initiative, we are generating public debate, informing the news media, improving and increasing news coverage, strengthening the capacity of advocacy groups to deliver new messages, and moving policy objectives at the local, state and national levels. This initiative is supported by the Nathan Cummings Foundation and the Ford Foundation.

Family to Family

Since 1995, CCMC has helped advance the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Family to Family (F2F) foster care reform initiative, which provides practical tools for states and communities to reconceptualize, redesign, and reconstruct their foster care system. We provide a variety of services and activities to F2F sites, including crisis management assistance, media readiness training, development of strategic communications plans, and writing and editing of materials.

Independent Court

www.independentcourt.org

Working with the Coalition for a Fair and Independent Judiciary, CCMC has helped keep the public dialogue on judicial nominations balanced and fair since 2001. CCMC provides media support to coalition members, especially members who seek a voice in the public dialogue on nominations to the federal court, but who have few communications resources. CCMC also provides electronic news clips on these issues to hundreds of nonprofit activist across the country on a regular basis. The Open Society Institute funds CCMC’s work in this area.

The Census Project

www.thecensusproject.org

Nearly everyone in the U.S. relies upon the essential demographic and economic information the Census Bureau collects. State and local governments need census information to plan for roads and transit systems, schools, healthcare facilities, senior citizens’ and daycare centers, and to monitor the progress of their communities. Civil rights and community organizations monitor the data to determine whether all segments of the population are treated fairly in the apportionment of public and private resources. Even media organizations rely on census data to provide unbiased, credible information for their reporting and analysis of the news.

CCMC’s Census Project is a multi-year effort that involves more than 20 stakeholder groups who use census data. The focus of the project is to obtain full federal funding for the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS) – the replacement for the decennial long form. When fully implemented toward the end of the decade, the ACS will provide official data every year, instead of once-a-decade. The project is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Population Reference Bureau.

Learning Disabilities Project

www.focusonlearning.org

This multi-year project is linking the early care and education community with the learning disability movement. The goal is to encourage a dialogue between the two communities in order to put together tools that parents and early care providers can use with 4-year-olds to identify and respond to potential learning difficulties that young children may have as they enter the K-12 system.

CCMC helps facilitate the dialogue between the two communities based on its prior experience working with both. CCMC also will help publicize ongoing research and reports that will be produced on the subject in 2006 and beyond. The project is supported by the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation.