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Every DC Child a Champion
Ensuring Kids in DC are Healthy, Ready
for School and Excited about their
Futures
Fight For Children recently concluded
a research project on how best to
address the challenges facing low-income
kids with the publication of
Every DC
Child a Champion.
This report provides a framework for
Fight For Children’s future efforts in
early childhood education and wellness.
Fight For Children has concluded that it
will undertake a comprehensive campaign
to ensure that all DC children,
particularly those in low-income
communities, are healthy and ready for
school. Fight For Children is currently
designing a multi-faceted program that
will bring together program and funding
partners from government, the non-profit
and corporate sectors, and foundations.
The goals of the campaign will include:
- Garner additional financial support
for school readiness and early childhood
health programs
- Bolster community outreach efforts to
more effectively engage parents and
families
- Focus existing efforts on achieving
measurable outcomes
- Communicate DC’s strategic plan for
school readiness
Background on Every DC Child a
Champion
Fight For Children is committed to
investing in programs that can have the
greatest positive impact in the lives of
the city’s low-income youth––programs
that can help the city’s youth grow into
healthy, educated, well-adjusted and
productive young adults. To that end,
Fight For Children developed a
research-driven framework and rationale
to determine how best to invest its
resources. Partnering with
Child Trends and the
Urban Institute,
two noted research institutions, Fight
For Children looked closely at the
indicators of childhood well-being and
the types and characteristics of
programs that lead to improvements in
those indicators.
The framework answered questions such
as:
- What are the most critical issues
facing children in DC?
- Which programs can best address these
issues and over what period of time?
- How much investment is needed to “move
the dial?”
- How should government and private
organizations like Fight For Children
work together to achieve success?
Guided by this research, Fight For
Children determined that the most
pressing challenges facing DC’s
low-income children would be best
addressed by focusing public and private
investment in the following five program
areas:
- Ensure children are ready for
school by providing high quality,
readily accessible preschool and pre-K
programs
- Reduce childhood obesity
- Increase the number and quality of
out-of-classroom programs that improve
math and reading assessment scores and
increase on-time high school graduation
- Reduce the number of low-birth weight
births
- Reduce the rate of teen pregnancy.
Recognizing the need to concentrate
its resources in fewer areas for greater
impact, Fight For Children further
reviewed the data in each of these five
areas, analyzing the:
- gap between the relevant national
and the local indicator
- magnitude of the problem in DC
- amount and/or type of resources and
attention currently targeted on the
problem
- relative social return on investment (SROI)
for the interventions under
consideration to address the problem
- probability of intended impact
- correlation between solving an issue
posed by the indicator and long-term
child well-being.
Upon review of these factors, Fight
For Children decided that it could have
the greatest impact on the most number
of young people by focusing its
investments over the next five years on
ensuring school readiness and reducing
childhood obesity. Looking deeper into
these two program areas provides insight
into the magnitude of the problems in
DC, the characteristics of successful
interventions, and the tremendous
potential to impact young lives in DC.
Download the complete report,
Every DC
Child a Champion to
continue reading.
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