Changing the odds for young people requires both passion and precision: passion in our commitment to providing high-quality support to all youth, and precision in measuring how well we and they are doing. In this column, Karen Pittman says it's possible, affordable and essential that we develop ways to measure community-level outcomes to help leaders change the ways they do business.

(2008) May is Foster Care Month, and for the 20th anniversary celebration of the campaign, Connect for Kids spoke with Candice Douglass, communications director with Casey Family Programs, to get the latest on foster care and child well-being, and emerging trends we should all know about. We also got the scoop the Kinship Caregiver Support Act currently in Congress and an innovative approach to permanency for teens in a Q&A with Celeste Bodner, executive director of FosterClub, the national network for young people in foster care. Find out what’s new, what’s working, and how you can make a difference no matter how much time you’ve got to give.

Where a child is born and raised can plays a surprisingly large role in his or her chances of getting and staying healthy and surviving to adulthood, according to this major new report by the nonpartisan Every Child Matters Education Fund. There’s a “huge investment gap” across the states—Every Child Matters is urging adults who care to get the facts and take action to make better investments and better outcomes a priority.

“Because I have a strong belief in the power of community action and citizen engagement in all areas of child well-being, I constantly comb major Websites and print publications for relevant Real People, Real Results stories to share with CFK readers,” writes Hershel Sarbin. A recent find in Casey Family Services Voices publication prompted his thoughts on how nonprofits can do a better job reaching a broad audience.

An April 2008 report from the America’s Promise Alliance has stunning data about the high school graduation rate in our nation’s 50 largest cities: only about half (52 percent) of students in the main school systems actually finish high school with a diploma—the number is as low as 35 percent in Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, and Indianapolis. A new Dropout Prevention Campaign is working hard to make sure those numbers improve, and that all students are ready for college, work and life.

Tracking the reach and results of the work is a challenging task for many child and youth organizations. In our ongoing Scorecard series, CFK and Child Advocacy 360 highlight examples of organizations' efforts to measure impact and results. Here, Children's Rights, Inc., shares its follow-up to the groundbreaking Hitting the M.A.R.C. foster care reimbursement study.

A few months ago, in this column, Hershel Sarbin challenged child advocacy organizations to do a better job of showing Return on Investment from research and surveys on critical issues in child well being. Here's what he's found so far.

In Bakersfield, California, parents formed a walking group that turned out to be good for the health of their community, as they took on dangerous litter, crime and traffic to make their streets more “walkable.” This grassroots snapshot from the Children’s Advocate has the story.

On February 27, the Forum for Youth Investment and its national partners launched the Ready by 21 Challenge to help state and local leaders "change the odds for youth by changing the way they do business." Here are some of the voices from the launch, and more on the initiative, which supports bigger goals, bolder strategies and better partnerships to ensure that every young person is ready by 21—ready for college, work and life.

President Bush's fiscal year 2009 budget proposal includes $2.8 billion in cuts to programs that impact children—a 3 percent drop from last year's federal budget. First Focus, a bipartisan children's advocacy organization, takes a reader-friendly look at the numbers and what they say about our nation's priorities.