Making the Most of Youth Mentoring: A Guide for Funders

How should funders decide what mentoring programs to support? The mentoring field has grown and diversified immensely in recent decades. There are now thousands of mentoring programs, as well as many multi-service initiatives that incorporate elements of mentoring, across the country. Some mentoring models have been rigorously evaluated, while others have yet to be tested at scale. There is, in fact, a rich research base to draw from to determine which types of mentoring make sense for which youth, and under which circumstances. But navigating that research is a challenge for even the most determined funder, policymaker or program leader

Early Childhood Development and the Law

Early childhood development is a robust and vibrant focus of study in multiple disciplines, from economics and education to psychology and neuroscience. Abundant research from these disciplines has established that early childhood is critical for the development of cognitive abilities, language, and psychosocial skills, all of which turn, in large measure, on the parent-child relationship. And because early childhood relationships and experiences have a deep and lasting impact on a child’s life trajectory, disadvantages during early childhood replicate inequality. Working together, scholars in these disciplines are actively engaged in a national policy debate about reducing inequality through early childhood interventions. Despite the vital importance of this period, the law and legal scholars have been largely indifferent to the dynamics of early childhood development. Doctrine and legislation are rarely developmentally sensitive, lumping children into an undifferentiated category regardless of age. The legal system thus misses key opportunities to combat inequality and foster healthy development for all children. And most legal scholars do not engage with the wealth of interdisciplinary research on early childhood, nor are they part of the interdisciplinary dialogue and policy debates. As a result, that conversation does not include the voices of lawyers and legal scholars, who are uniquely positioned to add critical insights. Remedying this stark disconnect requires doing for law what scholars have done in other disciplines: creating a distinctive field. Accordingly, this Article proposes a subdiscipline of early childhood development and the law. The new field crystallizes a distinctive interest that the legal system must attend to and charts a path for legal scholars to follow for years to come. As with the dawning of fields such as juvenile justice, domestic violence, and elder law, early childhood development and the law will be a focal point for research within the legal academy, a vital bridge to scholars in other disciplines, and an important means for bringing lawyers and legal scholars to the heart of emerging policy debates

A Compass in the Woods: Learning Through Grantmaking to Improve Impact

The field of philanthropy is under increasing pressure to produce – and be able to demonstrate – greater impact for its investments. A growing number of foundations are moving away from the traditional responsive banker model to becoming more thoughtful and engaged partners with their grantees in the business of producing outcomes. In the process, they are placing bigger bets on larger, more strategic programs and initiatives.  What the field is striving to do now is to ensure that this evolution is based on validated theory, not wishful thinking or shots in the dark. The larger the investment, the more skilled foundations must become at managing risk – making informed decisions, tracking progress, adjusting action and learning – throughout the life of a program, so that foreseeable and unforeseeable changes do not torpedo an otherwise worthy collective effort. The traditional grant?to?evaluation?to?adjustment cycle is very long. Because many traditional grantmaking practices are proving to be too slow to adapt, these foundations are striving to better integrate real?time evaluation and learning into their operations in order to become more adaptive; more innovative; more impactful.We undertook this research project to inform how the tools and practices that support Emergent   Learning (described in the next section) can best help foundations and their communities – grantees, intermediaries and other stakeholders – improve the way they learn in complex programs and initiatives

Good Principals Aren't Born -- They're Mentored: Are We Investing Enough to Get the School Leaders We Need?

Draws on survey data from a sample of experienced principal mentors who have guided interns in university-based principal preparation programs, and describes the present condition of mentoring for aspiring school leaders