At its core, a fiscal map shows how much money goes toward the services that support children and youth in a specific city, county, state, or Native nation—and the sources of that money. It helps leaders and advocates understand the existing funding in their community by pulling together the multiple federal, state, and local funding sources that support kids. Additionally, since a fiscal map examines a budget from a child-centered perspective (instead of from the traditional department-centered perspective), leaders and advocates can see how current budget dollars align with various outcomes for children.

But once you have a fiscal map, what do you do with it?

 A fiscal map is a valuable tool containing information that leaders can use to 

• align a community’s existing financial resources with their goals for kids, 
• coordinate programs and services across different funding streams,
• identify outcomes that need more attention, and  
• pursue new funding opportunities to support children and youth.

What does that look like in practice? Here are five examples of how states and communities have put their fiscal maps into action to support their goals for children and youth.

Expanding Child Care Access in New Hampshire

Advocates from New Futures, a health policy and advocacy organization in New Hampshire, partnered with Children’s Funding Project from 2022-2023 to create a cradle-to-career fiscal map for the state. The fiscal map revealed significant underspending in the state’s Child Care Development Fund allocation, the primary source of federal funding for child care subsidies for low-income working families. Only about 3,200-3,400 families accessed the child care subsidies, even though the state had the capacity to support about 5,500 families, explained Rebecca Woitkowski, vice president of policy at New Futures. After analyzing the fiscal map data, Woitkowski and her team advocated for state legislation to broaden the eligibility requirements for the child care subsidies and increase the number of families who could qualify. As a result, about 2,000 additional families gained access to the child care subsidies. 

“The really critical role of the fiscal map was to provide policy experts, lawmakers, and then our folks at the Department of Health and Human Services with a context and understanding of why we may be seeing this lack of participation in the child care scholarship,” Woitkowski said. “As a result of having that information, I was able to build a piece of legislation that was backed by federal guidance, other states, and build momentum to show our lawmakers that we were leaving millions and millions of dollars on the table every single year that could be directed to families.”

Providing Career Preparation for Youth in New Mexico

In 2023, members of the Northern New Mexico Pathways to Opportunity Strategy Table—a collaborative of 15 national, regional, and local philanthropic organizations committed to creating brighter futures for young people in Northern New Mexico—partnered with us to document the philanthropic and public investments in college and career pathways for youth in the region. After completing the fiscal map, members of the Strategy Table shared the fiscal map findings through a series of community-based meetings with parents, educators, nonprofit and business leaders, and other community members, and in focus groups with youth and funders to collect feedback about how the Strategy Table could best support youth in the region. 

Drawing on the fiscal map data and community feedback, members of the Strategy Table created the predominantly rural region’s first pooled fund to support career-connected learning opportunities for young people. The Northern New Mexico Youth Fund brings together philanthropic, corporate, and public resources to support career and technical education and work-based learning that embed youth leadership development and transition supports. During its first year, the Northern New Mexico Youth Fund secured $2.1 million in public and philanthropic funding, with a goal to raise $13.5 million by the end of its three-year pilot.

“With the fiscal map we had a real conversation based on real data about what was happening in our region,” said Alvin Warren, vice president of Policy & Impact at the LANL Foundation, which co-founded and serves as the backbone organization for the Strategy Table. “Then, instead of solving for what we imagine to be true, or what we assume to be true, we were solving for what was actually true. The fiscal map helped us make some hard choices about where and how to best invest future dollars.”

Expanding After-School Programs in Poughkeepsie, NY

The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet first partnered with Children’s Funding Project in 2022 to develop a fiscal map that analyzed the various federal, state, county, city, philanthropic, and community-partner investments that support the city’s children and youth ages 0-19. The fiscal map was the first step toward creating a strategic public financing plan that could transform education and employment outcomes in Poughkeepsie, NY, and improve economic mobility for the city’s youth.

The Poughkeepsie fiscal map showed most local resources went toward basic needs, like food programs, leaving positive youth development resources like after-school programs severely underfunded despite a need. Local leaders realized that changing outcomes for the children in their community required rethinking how they invested in youth. With the coordinating support of the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet—created in 2020 to serve as the city’s cradle-to-career place-based partnership—local leaders rallied around a citywide agenda that led to a multimillion dollar increase in funding for after-school programs. Since completing the fiscal map local leaders have accomplished the following:

• Poughkeepsie received $6 million in philanthropic funding to support after-school programs, including a recent six-year grant from The Wallace Foundation. In announcing the grant win, Gigi Antoni—The Wallace Foundation’s vice president of youth development—recognized Poughkeepsie’s “coordinated action, with youth at the center” as a key factor in the award. 
• Poughkeepsie City School District expanded its extended learning time after-school programs and increased the range of ages served. This represented an increased investment of $1.8 million in the district’s 2025-2026 budget. 
• Poughkeepsie City School District and city partners have secured $3.24 million in competitive federal grants. 

Since its inception, the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet has been advocating for greater investment in youth, including a successful increase in the City of Poughkeepsie’s youth services grants and increased summer program funding during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Strategic public financing has really opened my mind to what community and economic development can do,” said Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet Executive Director Jill Gomez. “There’s real innovation in this work.”

Strengthening the Early Childhood System in Nevada

The Children’s Cabinet, a nonprofit organization in Nevada, partnered with us from 2022-2023 to create a cradle-to-career fiscal map for the state as well as a more focused analysis of funding for children ages 0-8. Advocates from The Children’s Cabinet currently are using the fiscal map data to inform the policy priorities they want to bring to their state legislature, including a proposal for a new state department of early childhood and a request for additional state investments in the child care subsidy program.

“As advocates, we haven’t had the information or understanding about the fiscal piece to effectively advocate for increased investments,” said Denise Tanata, early childhood comprehensive systems advisor with The Children’s Cabinet. “That was the impetus to have the cradle-to-career fiscal map and the in-depth early childhood fiscal map—so we would have that data, information, and analysis to back up the work we’re doing.”

The Nevada state legislature meets only every two years, though, so it won’t convene again until 2027. In the meantime, Tanata and her team are conducting one-on-one meetings with state legislators to educate them about existing state funding for children, advocate for their policy priorities, and build support for early childhood investments leading into next year’s legislative session.

“Oftentimes, it’s really hard, not just for us as advocates, but even some legislators to go in and really have a good understanding when they’re talking about state budgets,” Tanata explained. “Having the fiscal map helps provide a more user-friendly presentation of a portion of the state budget in an interactive way that people can actually utilize and understand it better. So, in that way, it empowers not just advocates, but I think can and will empower some of our elected officials to be able to make informed decisions.”

Building State and Local Partnerships in Maryland

The Maryland Governor’s Office for Children—the hub of the state’s efforts to improve the well-being of kids and end child poverty in the state—partnered with us from 2024-2025 to create a state child and youth fiscal map that examines federal and state funding for kids ages 0-24. Through this collaboration, we also created a local fiscal mapping tool that includes federal, state, and local funding for all 23 counties and Baltimore City, making Maryland the first state to track all public funding available for kids at the state and local levels.

The fiscal maps will help leaders and advocates at the state and local levels build stronger partnerships to tap additional funding sources to support children and youth; strategically allocate resources to support programs for youth, families, and children; identify funding gaps to ensure that resources go where most needed; and guide decision-making about how to distribute resources efficiently.

Are you ready to create a fiscal map for your community? Contact us for information or read more about our state child and youth fiscal mapping partnership to see how a fiscal map can help your state or community support its goals for children and youth.

Kristen Loschert is communications director at Children’s Funding Project.