Linking the Child Care and Health Care Systems: A Consideration of Options

Funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, this report examines strategies for linking the health and child care systems in an effort to improve poor children's health. Studies show that poor, African American and Latino children have less access to health care and worse health outcomes than middle-class or non-Hispanic white children. With this reality in mind, the authors present five key strategies, identifying for each: the resources necessary for implementation, the strategy's potential to improve children's health, and the primary strengths and disadvantages -- including each strategy's promise for reaching the most vulnerable children. Drawing on interviews with experts in policy, health and child care, the report provides funders and policymakers with a framework for thinking about future interventions

Getting It Right: Strategies for After-School Success

This report synthesizes the last 10 years of findings from P/PV's and other researchers' work to address one of the most demanding challenges facing today's after-school programs -- how to create and manage programs that stand the best chance of producing specific, policy-relevant outcomes. It examines recruitment strategies that attract young people to activities, the qualities that make activities engaging and motivate participants to attend regularly, and the infrastructure -- staffing, management and monitoring -- needed to support such activities. The report's final chapter explores the fiscal realities of after-school programming, considering how administrators might stretch existing dollars to enhance services

Working Together to Build Beacon Centers in San Francisco: Evaluation Findings from 1998-2000

Since 1996, private and public funders in San Francisco have supported a city-wide Beacons Initiative. Eight Beacon Centers, located in public schools, serve 7500 youth and adults each year, providing a rich array of developmental activities in the non-school hours. This report looks at how the centers were created; it describes the centers' operation; and investigates the role of the initiative's "theory of change" in organizing and guiding the effort

Children’s Futures: Lessons From a Second-Generation Community Change Initiative

· This article describes Children’s Futures, a 10-year initiative in Trenton, N.J., that seeks to improve the health and well-being of children from 0 to 3 years old and ensure that they are ready for school. · During the first five years, the initiative was successful in implementing a number of evidence-based practices to improve children’s health, such as providing home visits to pregnant women, measuring and improving the quality of day care centers, and improving the use of information systems to track childhood immunizations. · Efforts to provide services for fathers and improve home-based child care were not successful; these are areas in which there are not any evidence-based practices. · Leveraging public and private money beyond the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s substantial $20 million commitment proved challenging because the foundation’s commitment was so large. The authors recommend obtaining agreements for matching funds prior to finalizing commitments. · A lack of attention to initiative-wide communications hindered integration across programs. · A need for a citywide data system was identified; this is being implemented in the second five-year funding cycle

Using Data in Multi-Agency Collaborations: Guiding Performance to Ensure Accountability and Improve Programs

A growing number of foundation- and government-funded initiatives are bringing together diverse partners within communities -- to create screening and referral systems, to coordinate and deliver services and to advocate for policy changes -- all in the interest of serving clients more effectively. Many of these efforts emphasize the use of evidence-based programs, and there is increasing recognition that to be successful, collaborating agencies must work together to collect relevant data and use it to inform and improve their programming

Collaboration and Community Change in the Children's Futures Initiative

In 2002, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched Children's Futures (CF), a 10-year community change initiative designed to improve the health and well-being of children from birth to age three throughout Trenton, NJ. CF's strategies included efforts to increase residents' access to prenatal and other health services, provide parenting skills education, improve the quality of available childcare and promote preventive healthcare among medical practices. The Foundation engaged P/PV to evaluate the implementation and outcomes of the initiative and to provide ongoing feedback on its progress.This report, and its forthcoming companion, Early Outcomes in a Community Change Effort to Improve Children's Futures, examine the promise of CF strategies. Collaboration and Community Change in the Children's Futures Initiative focuses on program implementation, participant recruitment and collaborations among Trenton's agencies. The second report examines programmatic improvements and early outcomes for CF families. Major findings from both are compiled in Children's Futures' First Five Years

Rising to the Challenge: The Strategies of Social Service Intermediaries

During the past decade, "intermediary organizations" have proliferated across the nonprofit sector. These organizations are typically positioned between funding entities (e.g., government agencies, foundations and corporations) and direct service providers. Intermediaries play an important roll in connecting organizations that share a common interest--and working to enhance the services these organizations provide, build larger service networks, promote quality standards, and monitor programs on behalf of funders

Children's Futures' First Five Years: Lessons and Early Outcomes of a Community Change Initiative

In 2002, The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation launched an early childhood initiative in Trenton, NJ, called Children's Futures (CF) to determine if focused efforts to bring about community change could make measurable differences in children's health and well-being and help ensure their readiness to enter school. The Foundation engaged P/PV to evaluate the implementation and outcomes of this ambitious initiative and to provide ongoing feedback on its progress. Children's Futures' First Five Years provides a summary of our findings, based on two longer forthcoming reports: Collaboration and Community Change, which investigates the initiative's major strategies and highlights collaborative practices, and Early Outcomes for Programs and Families in Children's Futures, which examines programmatic improvements and early outcomes for CF families

Spinal cord regeneration—the origins of progenitor cells for functional rebuilding

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Walker, S. E., & Echeverri, K. Spinal cord regeneration—the origins of progenitor cells for functional rebuilding. Current Opinion in Genetics & Development, 75, (2022):101917, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gde.2022.101917.The spinal cord is one of the most important structures for all vertebrate animals as it connects almost all parts of the body to the brain. Injury to the mammalian spinal cord has devastating consequences, resulting in paralysis with little to no hope of recovery. In contrast, other vertebrate animals have been known for centuries to be capable of functionally regenerating large lesions in the spinal cord. Here, we will review the current knowledge of spinal cord regeneration and recent work in different proregenerative animals that has begun to shed light on the cellular and molecular mechanisms these animals use to direct cells to rebuild a complex, functional spinal cord.KE is supported by a grant from The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) R01 HD092451, start-up funds from the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), and funding from the Owens Family Foundation

LOX/hydrocarbon rocket engine analytical design methodology development and validation. Volume 2: Appendices

This final report includes a discussion of the work accomplished during the period from Dec. 1988 through Nov. 1991. The objective of the program was to assemble existing performance and combustion stability models into a usable design methodology capable of designing and analyzing high-performance and stable LOX/hydrocarbon booster engines. The methodology was then used to design a validation engine. The capabilities and validity of the methodology were demonstrated using this engine in an extensive hot fire test program. The engine used LOX/RP-1 propellants and was tested over a range of mixture ratios, chamber pressures, and acoustic damping device configurations. This volume contains time domain and frequency domain stability plots which indicate the pressure perturbation amplitudes and frequencies from approximately 30 tests of a 50K thrust rocket engine using LOX/RP-1 propellants over a range of chamber pressures from 240 to 1750 psia with mixture ratios of from 1.2 to 7.5. The data is from test configurations which used both bitune and monotune acoustic cavities and from tests with no acoustic cavities. The engine had a length of 14 inches and a contraction ratio of 2.0 using a 7.68 inch diameter injector. The data was taken from both stable and unstable tests. All combustion instabilities were spontaneous in the first tangential mode. Although stability bombs were used and generated overpressures of approximately 20 percent, no tests were driven unstable by the bombs. The stability instrumentation included six high-frequency Kistler transducers in the combustion chamber, a high-frequency Kistler transducer in each propellant manifold, and tri-axial accelerometers. Performance data is presented, both characteristic velocity efficiencies and energy release efficiencies, for those tests of sufficient duration to record steady state values