Description
The National Center for Children in Poverty was established in 1989 to focus on the youngest children in poverty at the request of, and with funding from, the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York. In the ensuing years, NCCP expanded its mission to include children of all ages and their families. NCCP has five major objectives: (1) help policymakers understand and adopt the most effective programs and policies that can reduce family economic hardship and the negative effects of poverty on children; (2) assist service providers in their efforts to turn research into practice and identify and implement research-based programs; (3) support advocates as they develop and implement plans to influence public policy and resource allocation decisions; (4) collaborate with other researchers to deepen understanding of public policy issues and identify and advance effective programs, policies, and practices that promote the healthy development of children; and (5) aid the media in their attempts to tell the stories of poor children and families in America and shine a spotlight on the power of prevention
The center’s policy and research agenda has three priority issue areas:Family Economic Security, Early Childhood, and Health and Mental Health. With staff representing a wide range of disciplines, NCCP monitors a vast body of national and state-level demographic and policy research; gathers, evaluates, and synthesizes the most timely and significant findings; and makes all of these findings available via user-friendly, web-based tools on its website, which averages 30,000 user visits monthly.
NCCP also operates Child Care & Early Education Research Connections, a web-based, interactive database of research documents and public use data sets from major child care, Head Start, and early education research and evaluation studies that can be used to conduct secondary analyses. Research Connections is operated in partnership with the University of Michigan, Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, and funded by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families. More than 20,000 unique users, monthly, including leading policymakers, practitioners and researchers, use the Research Connections website.
