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The Annie E. Casey Foundation launched Family-Centered Community Change (FCCC) in 2012 to support three local partnerships seeking to help parents and children in high-poverty neighborhoods succeed together. These partnerships, located in Buffalo, New York; Columbus, Ohio; and San Antonio, Texas, are each developing a more integrated set of services, including housing assistance, high-quality education, and job training. Since 2013, the Urban Institute has been evaluating each initiative's design, implementation, and outcomes for families. The theory behind the demonstration is that "two-generation approaches," or coordinating high-quality programs and services for children and parents, can help break intergenerational poverty and move families with low incomes toward greater economic independence. This paper is one of a series of reports based on what we have learned from five years of observations from our research. The three FCCC initiatives provide services including early childhood education and child care, partnerships with local elementary schools, after-school care, employment and training for adults, financial education, and coaching to help parents set goals and stay on target. All three initiatives operate within communities where families move frequently and have widely varying needs and within neighborhoods with long histories of racial segregation and systemic racism, changing job markets, demographic changes, and gentrification. Many factors, including partnership strength, scope of effort, organizational capacity, and changes in funder priorities, affect the success or failure of a community change initiative (CCI). These initiatives are particularly challenging because they do not exist in a vacuum--broader forces affect the community. This report describes important changes across six key domains: (1) housing; (2) local economic trends; (3) transportation; (4) school systems; (5) early childhood education and child care; and (6) the federal policy context. For each, the authors discuss major systemic changes, how they have played out in the FCCC communities, and their implications for the initiatives' success.

The U.S. Department of Education's Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) is one of the Obama administration's major antipoverty initiatives and a core strategy of the White House's Neighborhood Revitalization Initiative. It is intended to improve educational outcomes by creating a continuum of school readiness, academic services, and family and community support for children from early childhood through college. The DC Promise Neighborhood Initiative (DCPNI) received one of the U.S. Department of Education's 21 Promise Neighborhood planning grants in October 2010. This policy brief summarizes DCPNI's planning year and how DCPNI intends to improve the educational outcomes of youth in the years to come. (Contains 1 table, 1 figure, 1 map, and 6 notes.)

A central goal of U.S. social welfare policy is to ensure that all children have the opportunity to reach their full potential as productive adults. Yet it is increasingly clear that where children live plays a central role in determining their life chances. This paper provides an overview of The Urban Institute's Program on Neighborhoods and Youth Development, which is dedicated to understanding the relationships between neighborhood-level factors and the well-being and development of children and youth and identifying and evaluating place-based, community-wide strategies to help children grow up to reach their full potential as adults. Specifically, this paper first presents a brief overview of theory and research on how social and physical context affects the life chances of children and youth. It then discusses the goals and initial research agenda for the Program on Neighborhoods and Youth Development, including (1) better understanding the dimensions of neighborhood environments that lead to negative outcomes for children to develop targeted interventions; (2) drawing on lessons from our research on housing and community-based interventions to inform policy initiatives aimed at improving outcomes for youth, such as Choice Neighborhoods and Promise Zones; and (3) using primary and secondary data at the local and national levels to explore how place affects development, health, and risky behavior for children and youth. (Contains 1 note.)

For roughly half a century, policymakers and researchers have debated the impacts of place, and in particular of inner-city neighborhoods, on employment, education, and mental and physical health. Research on programs that help people move to better neighborhoods has suggested that such programs can improve the life chances of low-income, mostly minority adults and their children. One important way children might benefit is by having access to better schools. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched the Moving to Opportunity for Fair Housing Demonstration (MTO) in 1994 in five cities to try to improve the life chances of very poor families by helping them leave the disadvantaged environments that contribute to poor outcomes in education and employment. The demonstration targeted families living in some of the nation's poorest, highest crime communities (distressed public housing) and used housing subsidies to offer them a chance to move to lower poverty neighborhoods. The hope was that moving would provide these families with access to better schools, city services (police, parks, libraries, sanitation) and economic opportunities. Participation in MTO was voluntary. Those who volunteered were randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups: a control group, a comparison group, or an experimental group. MTO focused on moving families into better neighborhoods and was not specifically targeted at improving educational outcomes. However, based on the findings from a housing desegregation program, MTO program designers expected that if families moved to low poverty communities, children could have access to better, more resource-rich schools with more advantaged peers, and that this access might lead to the children working harder and achieving more. On the other hand, children who moved to new neighborhoods and schools might respond negatively to competition from more advantaged peers, or teachers might single out the newcomers for sanctions. Two early studies of families in the Baltimore and Boston sites one to three years after random assignment showed promising results for experimental movers, especially significant improvements in school quality. In Baltimore, there was also evidence of positive impacts on reading and math scores. Follow-up research on the entire sample of MTO families at all five sites was conducted in 2002, about five years after the MTO families moved. Contrary to expectations, the results from the interim follow-up showed that children in the MTO experimental group were, in fact, doing no better academically than children in the other treatment groups. In addition, there were only limited improvements in school quality across the five sites. These findings have led researchers to conclude that MTO failed to provide experimental-group participants with real access to high performing schools and without access to better schools, there is less reason to think that MTO might affect children's educational performance. The mostly qualitative Three-City Study of MTO, a large-scale, mixed-method study, was designed to examine key puzzles raised by the interim evaluation, including the lack of effects on children's educational outcomes. The study combined qualitative interviews, ethnographic fieldwork, and analysis of census and administrative data. It was conducted in three of the five MTO sites: the interviews and ethnographic fieldwork took place in 2004 and 2005, 6 to 10 years after families' initial placement through the MTO program. This brief uses data from the Three-City Study to explore factors that seem to have kept MTO participants, who succeeded in moving to safer, less poor neighborhoods, from accessing better schools. Analysis suggests both the potential and the limits of a relocation-only strategy to affect educational options and outcomes for disadvantaged children. (Contains 5 endnotes.) [This report was produced by the Urban Institute's Center on Metropolitan Housing and Communities.]