Skip to main content

Blended-Funding Toolkit

Planning Tool
June 7, 2022
Get Resource

This toolkit is designed to provide state advocates and policymakers with strategies, tools, resources and options to make policy choices that facilitate the blending and braiding of funding streams to improve access to and length of children’s participation in full-workday, full-year, high-quality early learning programs that benefit vulnerable young children and working families. Though this tool focuses on child care specifically, sections 2&3 could be of use as examples of mapping current funding streams and considering how blending and braiding should work.

Explore More

State-level Data for Understanding Child Welfare in the United States

Report December 4, 2024

This comprehensive child welfare resource from Child Trends provides state and national data on child maltreatment, foster care, kinship caregiving, permanency, and older youth in care. The data are essential to help policymakers understand how many children and youth come in contact with the child welfare system, and why. States can use this information to ensure that their child welfare systems support the safety, stability, and well-being of all families in their state.

Ensuring Children in Foster Care get the Supports They Need: Innovating Our Way to Solutions

Blog November 26, 2024

Since 2020, BUILD Initiative has explored how the child welfare system and other early childhood systems (i.e., health, mental health, housing, early intervention, transportation, economic support, early care and education and all the child-and-family serving systems) can align and work together to achieve better outcomes for children and families. According to Dr. Cynthia Tate, who leads the project, several states are developing promising programs, policies, and strategies that can inspire other states.