This report by Children’s HealthWatch highlights the implications of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) on very young children. The report details research indicating that WIC improves children’s health as well as reduces the risk of developmental delays.

This fact sheets provides information as to whether children’s outcomes are better if they live in environments that are supportive in terms of family, peers, and community. Results indicate that children from supportive neighborhoods are more likely to have stronger connections compared to their counterparts from less supportive neighborhoods.

This guide is a resource for coaches who are currently working on or are planning to work with communities to promote change.

This Making Connections Peer Technical Assistance Match report summarizes the learnings from a meeting of two Making Connections sites -- Hartford, Connecticut, and Providence, Rhode Island -- when key members from the communities came together to exchange ideas and experiences about engaging youth in community change.

Harlem Children’s Zone,®Inc. has experienced incredible growth - from the number of children we serve to the breadth of our services. But one thing has stayed the same: the agency’s “whatever it takes” attitude when it comes to helping children to succeed.

The organization began 1970 as Rheedlen, working with young children and their families as the city’s first truancy-prevention program.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s quarterly Family Economic Success (FES) Newsletter provides updates on activities, developments, and resources in the three major areas of FES—workforce development, family economic supports, and asset building. The goal of Casey's FES work is to promote specific strategies that enable parents to get jobs and advance in the workforce, increase their income, and build and protect a base of assets sufficient to secure a better future for their families.

The Los Angeles Healthy Kids program provides health insurance to low income children in the county who have no other source of coverage (including undocumented children and children above the income limits for Medi-Cal and Healthy Families). These findings from a longitudinal survey of parents of young children in the program indicate that access to medical and dental care for enrolled children increased dramatically over time, use of the emergency room went down, and parents perceived improvements in the health status of their children. This analysis is one piece of a broader Urban Institute evaluation of the program.

Historically, residential segregation constrained where minorities could live, contributing to disparities in education, employment, and wealth. Researchers interested in the well-being and future prospects of low-income working families have not yet explored how their residential patterns may vary across racial and ethnic lines or considered the implications of these patterns. Therefore, this paper explores differences in neighborhood characteristics among white, black, and Hispanic low-income working families. The findings suggest that policies aimed at reducing the persistent disadvantages facing minority low-income working families need to address the ways the neighborhoods in which minorities live may be compounding these disadvantages.

Despite extensive research documenting the benefits of investing in young children, infants and toddlers are underrepresented in the federal budget, a new study from the Urban Institute and Brookings Institution found.

The nation’s 12.5 million children under age 3 are 4.2 percent of the population, but they received just 2.1 percent—$44.1 billion—of federal domestic spending in 2007. Domestic outlays, which exclude defense, homeland security, and international affairs, totaled $2.1 trillion.