In the summer of 2014, The Promise Neighborhoods Institute at PolicyLink (PNI) introduced model legislation to be used at the state and local level to secure support for cradle to career efforts. The Cradle to Career Act of 201_ secures funding for innovative, results-based, and comprehensive continua of solutions that connect children and youth to a high quality education and key health and social services that prepare them to succeed in college and in their careers. The legislation was intentionally drafted in a manner that it may be used to support various strategies that advance educational outcomes from cradle through college and career.

If you have questions, or would like to discuss the legislation in greater detail, please contact Lisa Cylar Miller, Deputy Director of the Promise Neighborhoods Institute at PolicyLink. She may be reached via email at LisaCM@policylink.org or via phone at 202-906-8016.

This publication from PolicyLink, the Coalition for Community Schools, Institute for Educational Leadership, and the West Coast Collaborative, and authored by William R. Potapchuk, demonstrates that community schools offer a powerful vision and strategy for what schools should look like within broader place-based initiatives and how community schools can benefit from alignment with other efforts like Promise Neighborhoods and other cradle-to-career, place-based strategies.

This document describes some of the key issues to be considered in undertaking a comprehensive evaluation of the performance and impact of the Promise Neighborhoods grantees at large. It provides the perspective of organizations who are working at the corner of evaluation and practice—seeking to improve the outcomes for poor children and families and to understand the most effective ways of measuring results.

This paper, produced by ChildTrends and commissioned by the Promise Neighborhoods Institute at PolicyLink, explores indicators and results to help focus Promise Neighborhood efforts on the healthy development and education of children.

This paper aims to provide guidelines for CBOs, and in particular Promise Neighborhood lead organizations, to consider when working with external evaluators and researchers. At the Harlem Children’s Zone® (HCZ®), we have learned many lessons over more than 30 years of collaborating with researchers. In this paper, we offer our perspective to other CBOs, in an attempt to share the knowledge we have gathered with those newer to the process.

This self-assessment tool contains several categories and, within each category, a set of statements communities can use to assess their current plans and capacity for developing a strong Promise Neighborhood implementation plan.

A critical incident is an event in which a leader attempted to address a challenge and things did not turn out as planned. This tool from Raj Chawla and Jolie Bain Pillsbury shows how critical incident analysis can help leaders see things in a new way and try something new.

Research Your Community is a new mapping tool available on the Healthy Food Access Portal that can help individuals and organizations better understand the communities in which they are working in to improve access to healthy food.

The tool can also be a valuable resource for your advocacy and fundraising efforts. The grocery landscape is ever changing, and data is one of many ways to paint a picture of a community’s need for healthy food access interventions. This webinar will train users about how to effectively leverage this new tool.

Created by Bridgespan for the Promise Neighborhoods Institute at PolicyLink, this 2010 guide is designed to help you hone your decision-making process so that you can focus on the issues that matter most to your initiative’s success.

This document, created by the Urban Institute, explores seven steps to align high-quality education with innovations in city and metropolitan planning and development.