In 2019, a group of young professionals from Poughkeepsie, NY, started thinking about how their hometown could benefit from new national models on transforming education and employment outcomes for youth. They engaged local officials and nonprofit leaders who shared their concerns about the harms of intergenerational poverty in their city, particularly its impact on youth and families. According to The Opportunity Atlas, children who grow up in the city’s Northside neighborhood have some of the lowest median incomes in the country as adults. (The Opportunity Atlas uses census and tax data to track economic mobility across the United States.)

Prior to the start of the 2019-2020 school year, community leaders gathered to discuss how to shift education opportunities and long-term socioeconomic conditions in Poughkeepsie. This initial gathering launched a leadership council co-chaired by the mayor and superintendent of schools. It included leaders from faith-based organizations, philanthropy, local businesses, city and county governments, hospitals, health networks, nonprofits, and other community-based organizations. From there, the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet was born.

“Poughkeepsie’s community leaders reconceptualized the issue as a holistic economic mobility statement: What is necessary to fuel opportunities for true social mobility for today’s young people?” says Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet inaugural Executive Director Jill Gomez, who was hired in fall 2023. 

The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet partnered with Children’s Funding Project to develop a strategic public financing plan that could help pave a path to that mobility. Our work in places like New Orleans, LA, inspired the endeavor, where the city and state dedicated millions of dollars in additional revenue to programs and services for children and youth.

The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet understood that kids in the community spent roughly 80% of their days outside the classroom. Yet out-of-school time programs and early childhood education were significantly underfunded. Poughkeepsie’s first step toward funding these programs in a sustainable way was to determine what funding was already being committed to children and youth in the city and the sources for that funding. To accomplish this, the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet partnered with us in 2022 to develop a fiscal map to analyze all the investments that support the city’s children and youth ages 0-19. Members of the Children’s Cabinet wanted to establish a baseline for the various federal, state, county, city, philanthropic, and community-partner sources of funding that support direct services for children and youth. Our team started by analyzing budget data from 2019 to have a baseline understanding of funding levels prior to the infusion of the COVID-19 relief dollars that are now waning. The fiscal map revealed a total of $61 million from public and private sources combined—a modest amount compared to the population of children the city needed to serve. 

Insufficient investments in civic infrastructure had resulted in a lack of coordination across Poughkeepsie’s cradle-to-career continuum, reducing the city’s effectiveness in addressing structural inequities. The Poughkeepsie fiscal map showed the majority of resources went toward basic necessities and interventions, like food and nutrition programs, leaving services like youth violence prevention, and after-school and summer programming significantly underfunded. City leaders realized that changing outcomes for the children in their community would mean changing how the city invested its resources in youth. Focusing on funding for out-of-school time and other positive youth development programs—along with the civic infrastructure to ensure a coordinated and comprehensive approach—offered the city a solution that could address larger systemic inequities and create population-level change across the cradle-to-career pipeline.

With this realization in mind, city leaders implemented several key funding changes to move toward their new vision for positive youth development:

• Through fiscal year 2024, the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet received more than $578,000 in local government funding: $378,000 in funding from Dutchess County and more than $200,000 in funding from the City of Poughkeepsie.
• The City of Poughkeepsie created the Division of Youth Opportunity and Development and hired the city’s inaugural youth services director.
• Poughkeepsie more than doubled the annual budget allocation for the city’s Youth Activity Grant from $180,000 (2018) to $440,000 (2024).
• Philanthropic support for youth programming increased by approximately $200,000 in summer 2022.
• Poughkeepsie fundraised $150,000 during the COVID-19 pandemic to provide laptops and internet access for students in Poughkeepsie City School District.

The holistic approach that Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet sought began to take shape. “[A]s we’re rolling out, it’s not just developing policy research but actualizing on-the-ground hopes and dreams of what a thriving environment for youth can look like,” Gomez explains.

To move the city’s vision from “hopes and dreams” to reality, city leaders had to determine how much their new goals for children would cost. Beginning in 2023, Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet partnered with us again to construct a cost model for an accurate picture of the financial resources the city needed to properly support out-of-school time programs and services. (The Children’s Cabinet plans to release the final cost model this fall.) Community collaboration during the fiscal mapping and cost modeling processes continued to generate momentum in Poughkeepsie, which led to community leaders seeking out and securing competitive federal grants and other national place-based funding that were sizable in relation to the size of the city. These awards included the following:

• $2.5 million in Full-Service Community Schools grant funding from the U.S. Department of Education awarded to the Poughkeepsie City School District in 2023. The award is one of the largest federal grants ever secured by the school district and is being used to scale the Community Schools Initiative across its five elementary schools. The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet worked closely with Poughkeepsie City School District to support its grant application, enlisting the assistance of national partners such as the EdRedesign Lab at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and the William Julius Wilson Institute at the Harlem Children’s Zone.
• $240,000 in federal AmeriCorps planning grant funding awarded to the national nonprofit Ampact to work with the City of Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County institutions to develop a local cradle-to-career AmeriCorps strategy. This unique partnership is a major component of a community strategy to create 100 service-year opportunities annually by 2026 for local residents to serve as AmeriCorps members in Poughkeepsie and Dutchess County.  Ampact has already launched two AmeriCorps programs in Poughkeepsie schools and early childhood centers, Early Learning Corps and K-3 Math Corps. Both programs are designed to support educators by training local residents to serve as on-site tutors. Combined, the two programs are offering 35 AmeriCorps positions locally. 
• $175,000 in philanthropic funding from The Wallace Foundation was awarded to the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet to support its cross-sector partnership work (including its focus on strategic public financing) to provide high-quality out-of-school time programming and eliminate barriers to access for adolescents.

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

To sustain this progress, the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet is in the process of hiring a children’s funding coordinator. This is being made possible through a unique collaboration between Children’s Funding Project and StriveTogether. Thanks to StriveTogether’s generous support, we are providing four partnerships within the StriveTogether Cradle to Career Network with financial support and technical assistance to hire and train children’s funding coordinators to lead local work to expand equitable opportunities for children and youth through strategic public financing.  Poughkeepsie’s children’s funding coordinator will receive assistance in developing a cost model for local early childhood services. Additionally, the new coordinator will receive coaching from our team on potential strategies and opportunities to direct existing financial investments for kids, and identify sources of additional funding to help Poughkeepsie achieve its goals moving forward. “One of the unique opportunities around this new role is institutionalizing what we have learned and utilizing cost modeling, and prioritizing children’s services into the future,” says Gomez.

The progress to date has been recognized by community leaders, who have committed to the region’s  strategic public financing work long term by adopting a “Promise City” framework to formalize collaboration moving forward. The City of Poughkeepsie, Dutchess County, Poughkeepsie City School District, and local private funder the Dyson Foundation have all signed a letter of intent with the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet to jointly examine and pursue opportunities to identify, aggregate, blend, and braid funding to expand cradle-to-career coordination and youth services. This ensures the region will make full use of all local, state, and federal funding streams available to support children, youth, and families.

All these tools will pave the way to the socioeconomic mobility that Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet—and others who may be inspired by its approach—seek to achieve.

“Strategic public financing has really opened my mind to what community and economic development can do,” adds Gomez. “There’s real innovation in this work.”

Brett McPherson is communications manager at Children’s Funding Project.