Information Session on a New Learning Community About Public Financing Strategies for Children & Youth Programs

June 30, 2021

Members, are you interested in learning more about public financing strategies for out-of-school time programs and other child and youth services? Are you eager to learn how to sustain the incoming federal investments? Join an upcoming information session on June 30 from 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. ET with the Children's Funding Project to learn about a new learning community opportunity for Grantmakers for Education members on public financing, offered through the Out-of-School Time Impact Group. The information session will provide a chance to learn about the goals of the learning community as well as to get your feedback on how to make this learning opportunity most useful to you.

The learning community will be designed to support your learning in the following ways:

• Short-term: Understand the flow of the American Rescue Plan, the emergency federal financing landscape, and the implications for state and local strategic financing capacity as it pertains to out-of-school time and other child and youth services.
• Mid-term: Strengthen state and local capacity to build robust strategies for publicly tracking fiscal data and highlight innovative models and approaches to the strategic financing of programs.
• Long-term: Develop philanthropic responses to support strategic finance planning for expanded out-of-school time and youth programming in states and localities over the next 3 – 5 years.

This event is exclusive to Grantmakers for Education members. There is no cost to attend this Grantmakers for Education program. Registration closes 15 minutes prior to the program time. Thank you for your patience; we review each registration in advance.

Speakers:

Elizabeth Gaines
Founder and Executive Director
Children's Funding Project

Elizabeth Gaines is the founder and executive director of Children’s Funding Project (CFP). Begun in 2018, to help communities and states expand equitable opportunities for children and youth through strategic public financing. CFP is the response to Elizabeth’s 25 year career in child advocacy that persistently led her to question whether adequate resources were being directed to children. She began her career leading after-school and community-based youth programs at the Atwood Community Center in Madison, Wisconsin. She later served as youth policy analyst for Citizens for Missouri’s Children, followed by 13 years at the Forum for Youth Investment, where she helped policy leaders develop tools and techniques to improve their use of data, increase their policy alignment, and more efficiently apply resources for greater impact.

As an expert on children’s policy at the state and local level, Elizabeth has worked with communities in nearly all 50 states to establish children’s cabinets, conduct fiscal maps, and pursue dedicated funding for youth. Her publications include: The Adding It Up Guide to Mapping Public Resources for Children, Youth and Families; the Forum for Youth Investment papers on state children’s cabinets and councils; How Public Policy Can Support Collective Impact, co-authored with FSG; and a collaboration on Funding Our Future: Generating State and Local Tax Revenue for Quality Early Care and Education. Since 2018, Elizabeth has guided CFP to dozens of projects with national networks, state and local governments, advocates, and youth leaders. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Elizabeth attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently resides in Washington, D.C.

Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom
Partner Consultant
Children's Funding Project

Alicia Wilson-Ahlstrom is a 20-year veteran in child and youth development policy, holding extensive experience working with foundations, partnerships and government units to engage leaders in learning and acting together to advance child outcomes in support of equity. She has worked most recently with the William T. Grant Foundation Use of Research in Policy and Practice and Research Practice Partnership learning communities; the Greater New Orleans Funders Network on educational equity; the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Forward Promise Initiative, and the Funders Learning Group for Using Evidence for Change to advance evidence-informed learning and action in the grantmaking, practice, policy and research arenas.

Formerly Director of Field Research at the Forum for Youth Investment, Alicia has extensive experience working with communities seeking to capture and align financing for children’s services and develop an action agenda for resource equity. A national expert on fiscal mapping, Alicia has collaborated with the North Carolina Early Learning Funding Initiative, Children’s Home + Aid of Illinois, the Skillman Foundation, Better Together Hennepin (MN), Baltimore B’More for Healthy Babies, the Greater New Orleans Funders Network, Jobs for the Future and the US Department of Education, and the Harvard Education Redesign Lab on projects to design fiscal mapping tools, learning labs and coaching supports to advance knowledge and capacity related to financing children’s services. Alicia holds a Master of Social Work and Master of Public Policy from the University of Michigan.