In the coming months we will profile members of our growing national network of children’s funding coordinators to showcase how these professionals help find ways to increase investments in the programs and services that children need and the benefits communities receive from having a dedicated person in this role. This series will explore the coordinators’ personal backgrounds, what led them to become children’s funding coordinators, the progress and focus of their communities’ strategic public financing work, the organizations they support, and the lessons they have learned from their journeys as children’s funding coordinators.

Philip Ferrari is a children’s funding coordinator based in Ohio working as manager of data science and analytics at Learn to Earn Dayton, a community-based organization focused on improving cradle-to-career outcomes for kids by using data, partnership, and policy advocacy to break down barriers and create pathways for lifelong success. Learn to Earn Dayton is part of the StriveTogether cradle-to-career network, and it’s through StriveTogether’s generous support that Learn to Earn Dayton was able to hire and sustain Ferrari’s new role. Ferrari was born in northwest Dayton to a family of educators: his grandmother was a kindergarten teacher and professor of early childhood education, his father was a career public school teacher. The City of Dayton is bisected by the Great Miami river, with a distinct racialized segregation of communities. The south east side of the river, where Ferrari spent his formative years in the Centerville community, is primarily white and affluent. The west side of the river, where Ferrari’s dad spent his career teaching art, is primarily Black and low income. The contrast between the resources available in the community he lived in, versus where his dad worked, was Ferrari’s first exposure to the inequitable opportunities afforded to children and would become part of the inspiration for his dedication to working to uplift children and their families.

Children’s Funding Project: Tell us about your current organization, Learn to Earn Dayton, and why you wanted to become a children’s funding coordinator.

Philip Ferrari: If you boil it down, our mission is about giving everyone, no matter their ZIP code, a real shot at economic mobility. We believe that education is the pathway that makes that possible. I remember the exact moment I wanted to become a children’s funding coordinator. I had been with Learn to Earn for a few years and I remember bringing up at a staff meeting that we were so focused on analyzing educational milestones: kindergarten readiness, third-grade reading, eighth-grade math, high school graduation, etc. But when you get to the heart of the matter, it comes down to funding and the equity of that funding. That’s what really drives outcomes. My comment was that we really needed to be studying the investments that were driving the outcomes we were seeing. Our CEO had recently had a conversation with [Children’s Funding Project] about strategic public financing and children’s funding coordinators. After that meeting, she approached me about leading this research. 

Children’s Funding Project: Let’s talk about that research. What is the focus of your strategic public financing plan and what work are you currently doing?

Ferrari: We’re looking at building a comprehensive cost model to ensure sustainability of programs in Dayton that are currently working from Promise Neighborhoods money through the U.S. Department of Education. Local community providers received significant investments for short periods of time, so we’re looking at long-term sustainability for these programs. These are two-generation programs that support kids and families together on workforce development and child development. We know that providers running these programs are doing fantastic work and have relationships with entire families that they already serve. So our focus is understanding the impact of that work from not only the outcomes of people getting jobs and students reading at grade level, but also the economic inputs that they have to invest in their staff, in their facilities, etc. to make these programs effective. It’s simply not sustainable if we don’t have government investment. So our goal is to package all that and understand all those expenditures and advocate for public funding streams within our state, local, and regional governments that allow us to continue and expand these practices that we know are working. 

Ultimately, we want to create self-sustaining wages and jobs, which will increase the tax base for these communities and allow them to thrive. A lot of the partnerships in StriveTogether, we talk about creating healthy, happy, tax-paying citizens as part of our goals. That is exactly what we’re looking to do—to create the opportunities for people to live healthy lives through economic mobility.

“It’s simply not sustainable if we don’t have government investment.” —Philip Ferrari

Children’s Funding Project: Tell us about a few past experiences you have drawn on to help you in your role as a children’s funding coordinator.

Ferrari: After college I worked as the regional field director for We Are Ohio, which ultimately became the strongest win for a nonpartisan campaign in Ohio over the last 50 years. We were advocating on behalf of teachers, policemen, firefighters to push back against state legislation that would have eliminated their rights to organize. This role took me to both urban and rural areas talking to constituents. I was knocking on doors in downtown Dayton and rural communities like Darke County, which is extremely rural, where you’re driving 20 miles to get to the next house. The clear through line between all these disparate ways of life was them caring about safety and education for their kids. I also learned how to determine where there are pockets of influence and how to get the most return for your time spent, it was extremely data driven work and piqued my interest in how you could use data for good. 

Then, when I was doing research as a graduate assistant at Wright State University it was kind of two roles in one: It was a research role and it also involved the facilitation of relationships between the university and external partners. Building those interpersonal relationships and true partnership between organizations was essential to getting anything done. When you build from that you can effectively use data to advocate. 

I also worked as the director of the 21st Century Community Learning Center at YMCA Dayton and later became the executive director of the neighborhood development center. It was important to me to work my way through an organization, especially at that age. To know what it was like working at a school building, working with individual families, and getting to understand the real work. I got to work with 1,400 individual students in Dayton Public Schools in Trotwood doing resource referral, out of school time, [and in] after-school camps and also worked with other community organizations in the area helping them with data analysis and impact reporting.

Children’s Funding Project: We know that success for children hinges on the caring adults who surround them. Who in your life helped make you the person you are today? Tell us about a time when that person exemplified what you admire most about them.

Ferrari: Dr. Jack Dustin was my mentor in graduate school, and he was just an awesome human being. He had an atypical perspective on using data as a tool for justice, which was inspiring to see every day. He came from a life experience that was different from every other professor or researcher I had known. He became a parent when he was only a teenager , and you don’t typically see high-level Ph.D. researchers come from that kind of background. There’s often a very linear and narrow path you have to follow and there’s not a lot of lived experiences these researchers tend to share with what they’re researching. Having that lived experience really impacted his understanding of people and his perspective on how to approach analyzing large data sets. We worked together on researching how to alleviate food deserts and reinvesting in communities overlooked in the recovery from the 2008 economic crisis. Working with him taught me that it’s never a math problem, it’s a people problem.

Children’s Funding Project: Given the disparities that exist in how young people are able to access high-quality publicly funded programs, how did your experiences growing up influence your life?

Ferrari: I had an amazing, happy childhood where I didn’t have to confront the horrible inequities that were going on in the world. But I’d hear about it. My dad would talk about what was going on in his school and my grandmother would talk about her research with kids in Cleveland. My mom stayed home until [I was in] sixth grade. There were a lot of participating parents in my community keeping an eye on all us kids. We had a park walking distance from my house. I got to go to free summer camp every year through the parks district. I played sports. Our community had a ton of assets to support kids.

Children’s Funding Project: What are some reflections and learnings you’ve gained from your work as a children’s funding coordinator?

Ferrari: Public funding is very complicated to understand, but not impossible. It takes time and a little bit of elbow grease, but if you know what you’re looking for and you ask the right questions you can get some really great answers. Having Children’s Funding Project as my chaperone through that has been so important, especially with all the things happening at the federal and state levels. It’s been so great to have you all to really walk through all of this with us. In Ohio, we have to get a better understanding of how funding is working, or frankly not working, for different communities. Part of why it’s not working is that it’s so complicated. 

Second, I’ve learned that sustainable change takes both policy and people. The relationships have to be there and there needs to be mutual understanding about what you’re asking for, why you’re asking for it. Whether that’s elected officials, partner organizations, families, etc. The third thing is we really need cross-sector collaboration to make this effective. We have to get better at looking together at systems rather than silos. I feel very invested in this work, and thanks to the investment we got from StriveTogether, for the foreseeable future I plan to be here. I love this work and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

If you are interested in establishing a children’s funding coordinator position in your community, please complete our readiness survey. Questions? Contact Kenny Francis, director of coaching and capacity, at [email protected].

To learn more about Learn to Earn’s strategic public financing plan, contact Philip Ferrari at  [email protected].

Kenny Francis is director of coaching and capacity at Children’s Funding Project.