This is the fifth blog in a six-part blog series on Children’s Cabinets and integrated supports and services for children.
By Guy Johnson and Melissa Mitchell
There is an increasing amount of hand-wringing over how, exactly, schools have used - or haven’t used - the unprecedented amount of federal financial support they have received over the last couple of years. Similarly, a steadily growing stream of articles and resources are focusing on how to determine whether these public funds have been - are being - used effectively and efficiently under current timelines. Today, we turn to an important third part of this analysis: are states currently using funds for child-serving agencies in aligned, coherent, and sustainable ways?
The basic framework of our blog series comes from work the Forum for Youth Investment has done to compile and organize best practices related to Childrens’ Cabinets. In this series, we have been discussing the integration of services and supports at a broad level, though it bears mentioning that there have also been efforts to convene Childrens’ Cabinets around smaller, more discrete populations like, for example, young people involved with the juvenile justice system. In either case, the inherent complexity and variety of funding streams for child-serving work -as well as the variety of potential recipients of funding - can function as a fundamental barrier to the integration of supports and services across recipient agencies and organizations. The Forum states this much more simply: “Without purposefully mapping those funding streams it is hard to know how to coordinate them most effectively.”
We will look today at efforts in New Mexico, Kansas, and Illinois to align funding for children’s services in their state. Their efforts mirror the best practices for “aligning money” as identified by the Forum: fiscal mapping; developing dedicated funding streams; blending and braiding funds.
We begin in New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment. In November 2021, the "New Mexico Early Childhood Development Partnership," which is the policy arm of United Way of Santa Fe County, prepared a four-year financial plan for aligning early childhood programming across state agencies. The plan included shared goals, actions, and measures, detailed projections for infrastructure and quality support costs, and projections for the cost of direct service programs including: child care assistance; Pre-K, including universal Pre-K by FY2026; home visiting; and the Family Infant Toddler (FIT) program. Among the plan’s strategies for supporting the increased alignment of funding was a plan to allocate early childhood funding based on birth cohorts rather than public school kindergarten enrollment, to enable a more accurate counting of all children and support greater numerical consistency across early childhood programs. The plan also sought to make funding streams more consistent for early childhood programs by providing funding based on enrollment instead of by attendance.
New Mexico’s Children’s Cabinet is one of two key groups identified in the Plan, along with the state’s Early Learning Advisory Council, to receive regular updates and be given the opportunity to advise and ask questions. The difference between the Council and the Cabinet is important with regards to efforts around alignment: the Council advises the legislative branch; the Cabinet coordinates across state-level agencies, which are the executive branch.
That implementation of the plan involves specific efforts to organize engagement among the legislative and executive branches of government in New Mexico - loosely speaking, the branch charged with setting funding levels for government services and the branch charged with prioritizing the provision of services under those funding caps, exemplify the state’s broader efforts to align public money related to services for children.
Key parts of these broader efforts pre-date the plan’s publication. For example, in 2020, Governor Grisham, with bipartisan support, signed the Early Childhood Trust Fund into law to help create an additional source of sustainable funding for these services. To help alleviate the financial burden on programs serving higher need families, the state’s Early Childhood Education and Care Department (ECECD) has started providing support to providers for home visit services according to a sliding scale of need.
In 2021, the state legislature passed a resolution to enable voters to decide whether to use monies from the Land Grant Permanent Fund to help support the ECECD. This November, if the ballot resolution is approved by New Mexicans, early childhood programming in the state will receive an additional sustained funding stream from the Fund, which includes state revenue gained from leases and royalties produced by non-renewable natural resources, like oil and gas, as well as income from returns on invested capital.
This brings us to Illinois, a state that provides another example of progress on the alignment and braiding of funds as well as reasons to be cautious about the shifting of political winds. Under former Governor Bruce Rauner, the state worked with key private-sector partners to first sort the state agencies’ existing goals into six general areas - Educated, Stable, Healthy, Employable, Safe, Connected - and then tracked the state-funded services and supports that were aimed at achieving these goals. Similar to the work done by the United Way of Santa Fe in New Mexico, Illinois’ nonprofit partners - including Children’s Home and Aid - tracked how much funding was going into these programs and services and produced a fiscal scan that enabled state agencies to more clearly see how their investments were working towards ensuring the thriving of all children and young people in Illinois. The scan – which is now conducted annually – focuses on how funding is allocated across the six goal areas across age ranges, from 8 to 25. While Illinois already had well-developed early childhood/learning systems in place, a real gap existed as to shared knowledge around children after early childhood.
Using this shared information as a starting point, the state’s Children’s Cabinet – now on hiatus – worked to establish a set of goals that required the collaboration and alignment of efforts, funding and resources across multiple state agencies. While the Cabinet’s work has not officially disbanded, it has laid dormant since the Democratic Party regained the governorship in 2018.
The Free State, Kansas, has made similar efforts to align funding on a state level. The Kansas Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund (KCCTF) is responsible for distributing funds to a range of thematically connected programs and services, including Child Care Assistance, Family Preservation Services, Infant-Toddler Services, and Parents-as-Teachers. Roughly one-third of the KCCTF's budget is dedicated to Kansas's Early Childhood Block Grants (ECBG). The KCCTF distributes ECBG funds to school districts, child care centers, Head Start sites, and community programs that provide preschool and research-based development services. The grant process prioritizes services for at-risk children and in underserved areas.
The KCCTF also has specific budgetary review responsibilities for the Children’s Initiatives Fund (CIF), created in 1999 by the Kansas legislature to support programs promoting the health and welfare of Kansas children. The KCCTF Cabinet reviews, assesses, and evaluates all CIF budgetary decisions and provides recommendations based on this analysis to the governor and the legislature to inform decision making around future allocations to the CIF. The Children’s Cabinet annual report includes profiles of CIF programs.
As for its own sources of funding, the KCCTF receives an annual influx of approximately $50 million from the Master Tobacco Settlement. The consistency and reliability of this funding means, for example, that ECBG recipients around Kansas can be confident every year that they will receive funding from the state based on performance and need, not shifting political priorities. Dedicated funding has also enabled the KCCTF to gather better, more longitudinal data on program and grantee performance.
Each of these states’ approaches and experiences offers lessons for other states, counties, and municipalities considering efforts, like Children’s Cabinets, to support the greater integration and alignment of services and supports. Efforts in New Mexico, Illinois, and Kansas are also broadly reflective of best practices related to Children’s Cabinets and “aligning money” as identified by the Forum for Youth Investment:
Fiscal mapping: developing a shared understanding of where funding is coming from and where it’s going.
Developing dedicated funding streams: identifying, creating, and/or consolidating funding streams so as to build a consistent and stable form of funding to support the Cabinet’s goals.
Blending and braiding funds and goals: developing shared goals across an age range or developmental range and working to align funding appropriately.
These best practices also directly reflect the common fiscal challenges to the alignment of services and supports: a complex assortment of funding sources for closely related services; budgetary constraints, including the potentially significant impacts for program funding that can come from changes in political control of the state legislature and/or governorship; goals, actions, and measures for program activity that can reflect the requirements of individual funding sources more than a broader, shared, coherent strategy.
And with that we will close, with thanks to our colleagues Holly Bluhm and Jacob Deitz, whose hard work and research informed large portions of this blog. For all of their stellar contributions, we decided ultimately to pass on one idea they had for a closing paragraph that likened the prospect of fiscal cuts to “facing the guillotine.” Let’s not lose our heads. Rather than Robespierre, we’ll finish with Lao Tzu, who, twenty-five centuries ago, had important advice for state budgetary officials across the United States: “I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.”