A recent First Focus report, The Cost of Doing Nothing, offers a stunning analysis of the long-term impact of the current recession on child poverty and our nation as a whole. So is anyone really paying attention? And what can advocates do to drive home the issue -- and the solutions? I asked the report's author, Michael Linden, to weigh in.

Hope Meadows, an intergenerational community in Illinois, creates a stable, extended family network for children moving from foster care to adoption. Its founders just keep doing more to impress and inspire me – and their work has motivated me to take action, following my own “Communication as Catalyst” theory...

The core belief here at the Forum for Youth Investment – that all young people should be Ready by 21 – ready for college, work and life – often provokes public criticism. The exchanges typically go like this:

"Not every young person needs to go to college," calls out one person from an audience. True, I say, but all should be ready to.

In this October 2008 blog entry, Hershel Sarbin reacts to a recent CFK article on Hope Meadows, an intergenerational community launched in 1993, and how “smartly its founders have adapted to changing conditions over the years.” Therein lies a model for all of us, he says.

In this column, Hershel Sarbin, publisher of Child Advocacy 360, lays out the basics of the Scorecard Initiative and asks for your help in identifying efforts across the country that are making a difference for kids and youth. ISO: Real People, Real Results.

Karen Pittman recently sat down with the real experts on the "high school dropout crisis" -- seven students from Des Moines, five of whom had dropped out and another who had come very close. In her latest Youth Today column, Karen shares what these young people had to say about why they left, what made them return to school and what they recommend for education.

It is clear that there is a huge gap between the good work being done to improve children’s lives in communities across America and the communication required to demonstrate the results being achieved—and we’re going to do something about this, as Hershel Sarbin notes in this column.

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.

“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.

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.