Projects

Evaluation of Grantmaking by NYC Child Care and Early Education Fund

The Child Care and Early Education Fund was founded in the spring of 2000 as a multi-year funders' collaborative by a group of private foundations joined by representatives from three city agencies. The goal of the collaborative was:

"to achieve systemic improvements in the quality and accessibility of child care for large numbers of New York's children by encouraging new approaches that will advance the child care field…[and ] supporting collaborations…that will lead to improvements in services."

The Fund's primary strategy was to support grantee projects that would promote sustained improvements in child care quality and access. This strategy absorbed the bulk of the Fund's financial resources and member and coordinator attention.

A second Fund strategy was to facilitate conversations and relationships among stakeholders. Some work involved bringing grantee staff in contact with public sector agencies and convening grantees for cross-project and cross-organizational learning and relationship building. The Fund also engaged in ongoing conversations, both formal and informal, with public sector agency leadership.

The Fund's third strategy was to sustain and grow itself as a collective entity with a role to play in the early care and education policy arena. Making connections with public agency staff and with public officials was one activity under that strategy.

The first two years of the evaluation concentrated on documenting progress of grantee organizations in meeting their implementation benchmarks and project results - that is, the activities supported by the grant and the benefits realized from the grant activities. Beginning in the third year of the evaluation, the focus shifted to identifying and measuring progress toward system changes to which the grant activities were expected to contribute. Data for the evaluation were collected primarily through in-depth interviews with a wide range of "informants," supplemented by review of documents and observations of meetings, site visits, and other activities. The analysis of these data focused on measuring the amount of progress made toward the system changes identified through consultation with grantee staff and documenting the contributions made by the grant activities toward those changes.