Harvard Project on Effective Services

Foundations Private foundations have played a critical role in raising the profile of social indicators as public policy tools. Through its national and state Kids Count projects, the Annie E. Casey Foundation has fostered the use of social indicators to monitor child well-being by groups inside and outside of government at all levels. Kids Count data have become a part of direct government planning in several states, and figure prominently in the policy discourse of many states and localities. Other foundations have been working to develop the information and the techniques required for policy-related applications of social indicators, and to actively encourage their adoption. The Improved Outcomes for Children Project is a joint effort led by the Center for the Study of Social Policy and the Harvard Project on Effective Services; its funders include the Lilly Endowment, the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Danforth Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation. This effort has focused on the implementation of goals identification and outcomes-based accountability strategies by states and local communities to improve outcomes for children. We strongly recommend that foundations continue to fund efforts of this sort, since their importance will only grow as devolution advances. In addition, we suggest several complementary areas where foundations can play a facilitating role. First, as the need for cooperation and information exchange across states and localities increases dramatically under devolution, the mechanisms to accomplish these functions must also evolve. Foundations can provide initial funds to establish these important links across jurisdictions. Second, we recommend that foundations help the academic community and the policy community to forge stronger links. Developing and refining social indicators where good measures are currently lacking requires basic research. Another important task is the development of cost-efficient means by which states and localities can measure and track these indicators. Academics and policy makers must develop theories and models to direct the use of social indicators for various purposes. x  Although we expect that the federal government will help fund such linkages, we believe that foundations must also make investments. Social indicators are by their nature cross-cutting, while federal funding tends to be area-specific due in part to the compartmentalization of its agencies. Foundations have much greater flexibility to support efforts which are by their nature integrative, comprehensive, or cross-cutting.