TCP partners with local schools and communities to develop tested, practical solutions that can improve the lives of children. Pilots bring immediate and concrete benefits to the communities served, while providing an invaluable way to test out real-world solutions that can work on a larger scale. These on-the-ground demonstrations also help us spot barriers in state policy or practice where change is needed and our advocacy should be directed.
Pilot programs include:
Ventura County Foster Health Link is a public-private joint effort to utilize the potential of information technology to improve health and wellness outcomes for the 1,000 children and youth living in foster care in Ventura County, and ultimately, for the almost 60,000 children living in foster care in California. The Children’s Partnership has worked with Ventura County Human Services Agency, Ventura County Health Care Agency, the California Health and Human Services Agency, Verizon Foundation, Ventura County Medical Resource Foundation, and Believe Health to develop this pilot.
California Virtual Dental Home Project is bringing dental care to where children are. The Children’s Partnership has worked with partners to test telehealth applications on the ground to ensure that more children reap the benefits of this technology and get the health and dental care they need. We are working with the University of the Pacific to implement a teledentistry project to bring dental care to where children are, such as in schools and at Head Start sites. Ultimately, this approach can extend dental care to the roughly 25 percent of California’s children who would otherwise go without it.
School2Home (2008-ongoing) is a model program designed to help low-performing middle schools in California integrate technology into teacher training, student work, and parental involvement in their children’s education. Piloted at Stevenson Middle School in Los Angeles and at Central Middle School in Riverside, CA, and then expanded to one additional LA Unified middle school and two Oakland Unified middle schools, this program has reached 2800 students, parents, and teachers. Evaluations of the program revealed the significant increase in parental involvement in their child's education through the technology program.
Express Lane Eligibility (1998-2012), a signature program of The Children's Partnership, focuses on streamlining enrollment into public health insurance programs. As a part of this multi-year effort, TCP field-tested the concept, through pilot programs in 100 schools serving low-income families in California. The pilots helped identify what worked, as well as important changes that were needed. Informed by these community pilots, The Children's Partnership developed policy proposals and led advocacy efforts that resulted in Express Lane being enacted in California and in the federal Children's Health Insurance Program. Moreover, the pilots helped develop new constituencies for child health among educators, county workers and others.
Past Projects
Computers In Our Future was a $7,000,000 multi-year effort to bring computers and the Internet into 11 low-income communities located across California through community technology centers and to facilitate their use for community goals. This effort not only enabled computer access for tens of thousands of California residents but also served to help train more than 25,000 young people with marketable digital skills. These pilots also led to the creation of an effective policy voice for community-based technology efforts and led to the passage of several pieces of relevant legislation as well as serving as a model for the rest of the nation.
