May 2005

Back in the olden days – say, four years ago – states such as Pennsylvania had significant surpluses in their welfare programs.  The federal welfare reform legislation, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), had changed welfare into a block-grant program.  TANF allowed states to keep the savings generated in their federal welfare block grants when welfare rolls were reduced.  It also gave states more flexibility to invest in other valuable services such as family preservation and youth development.  Now, the TANF surpluses are being fully exhausted and facing new challenges in Congress as welfare caseloads tick up, and the programs that relied on those surpluses are in financial danger. 

The ebb-and-flow among funding streams for programmatic strategies is inevitable over the long term.  The solution, says Jo Ann Lawer, president and CEO of Philadelphia Safe and Sound, is to have an investment strategy that both anticipates funding challenges and has built-in adaptability.

As one of five campaigns around the country that comprise The Robert Wood Johnson’s Urban Health Initiative (UHI), Philadelphia Safe and Sound was asked by the City of Philadelphia to help it develop a long term investment plan for programmatic strategies (including after-school) targeted to improving youth outcomes.  “At the time we developed our investment plan, we knew the TANF surplus couldn’t last forever,” Lawer says.  “We made sure we examined as many other possible avenues for funding of after-school as possible.”

Other quivers in the arrow

One of those avenues is known as Act 148, an existing State mechanism.  Act 148 was amended in 1991 to legally require that all counties in Pennsylvania, including Philadelphia, develop an annual needs-based budget request for its child welfare and delinquency services. This budget request includes funding for a critical array of prevention programs including the City’s extensive commitment to after-school programs through the City’s Children’s Investment Strategy (CIS).  In this needs-based budget process, the state cobbles together funding streams, including TANF, Act 148, and others to fund local child welfare needs. With Pennsylvania’s TANF surplus diminished, the state is cutting back on the amount of TANF funds used for children’s services. The state has proposed devoting more Act 148 dollars in place of the dwindling TANF funds. The City and Safe and Sound are working together to ensure that the state completely fills the gap, without any shortfall that would threaten programs. 

There are a couple of caveats when tapping Act 148 dollars, according to Charles Lyons, consultant to Safe and Sound.  For one thing, Act 148 requires a local match that TANF does not.  So the City may have to expand its current strong fiscal commitment to after-school programming.   

Lyons also cautions that the City will have to be diligent in ensuring that after-school services retain eligibility for this funding.  After-school is considered a prevention program and is therefore eligible for funding.  It is conceivable, however, that in even tighter budgetary climates the definition of “eligible program” could be narrowed to exclude after-school or related programs – a semantic change that has the same effect as an outright budget cut.

Another route to increase funding for after-school is to understand, and take appropriate advantage of, the eligibility rules that differ from one funding stream to another to expand the portfolio of funding sources for these services.  Through its after-school efforts, Safe and Sound collects important data on participants.  This data helps in aligning funding sources with child eligibility, thereby increasing the number of youth served by optimizing the use of other discreet funds such as child care subsidies.  A challenge, however, is that it is much easier for program providers to simply have a contract with the City (via CIS) to provide services than it is to seek the agreements necessary from the State to serve families eligible for the subsidy program.

Lyons says that Safe and Sound developed a creative solution.  Providers who work with eligible families to draw down subsidies won’t lose all of their CIS funding.  Instead of receiving all of their funding from a CIS contract, these providers would receive a combination of CIS and the subsidies.  This combination of funding could end up being more than the provider would normally receive from a CIS contract alone.  Providers would consequently have the incentive to pursue the subsidies.  The upshot is that the subsidy funding is not “left on the table”, which frees up CIS funding to expand the after-school system for other ineligible youth.

With a separate grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Safe and Sound is helping many additional providers become licensed – a step providers must take in order to be able to receive the state child care subsidies.

Pooling funds

The 21^st Century Community Learning Centers (CCLC) is a program that, like welfare, has been devolved from federal to state administration in recent years.  And as is the case with TANF, Philadelphia Safe and Sound is helping the City maneuver this altered landscape.

For example, two years ago the State Department of Education asked for proposals for funding from 21^st CCLC.  Safe and Sound worked with the City of Philadelphia and the school district on a united proposal for 24 schools that stretched the available after-school dollars. 

The school district operated extended day programming focused on academics at those schools.  But, the criteria for 21^st CCLC funding included a broader array of “enrichment activities” than academics alone.  Safe and Sound helped to bridge the use of both City and school district funds.  “We told the school district that we have a large network of after-school providers, and we can connect you with the providers to supply the enrichment activities necessary to make your schools eligible for funding,” says Lyons.  “From a school district point of view, rather than selecting 24 different providers to offer the enrichment programming, they could go to Safe and Sound to pull together the CBOs to provide the services.”

That worked, but the 21^st CCLC dollars still did not fully fund programs at all 24 schools.  The City agreed to help pay for the enrichment activities, and the school district for the academic extended-day programming.  “The City, the School District and PSS banded together to convince the State Education Department that we knew they wanted to fund comprehensive programs,” says Lyons.  “We said if you pool the 21^st CCLC money with the city and school district money, we can fund all 24 schools.  The spirit of the 21^st CCLC criteria was met, and the 24 programs were funded seamlessly.“

Making the case for after-school

Developing funding streams for after-school is particularly difficult because in states such as Pennsylvania, very little funding is directly earmarked for after-school. According to Lyons, the closest thing after-school gets to a budgetary line item in Pennsylvania is via the Department of Labor and Industries’ workforce development efforts.  L&I provides about $6 million for after-school and other youth development programming in the city through the Philadelphia Workforce Development Corporation.

So indirect funding, by making sure after-school programming qualifies as “eligible”, becomes key.

Lyons says Safe and Sound makes the case by starting with data, including the City’s Report Card – created by Safe and Sound – on health and safety indicators for children and youth. 

“We look at the Report Card and other research and the correlation between after-school and risky behaviors – so many outcome improvements are correlated with effective after-school programming,” says Lyons.  “The logical next step is to show that link to the various departments, the link between after-school and what they are trying to accomplish, such as reducing delinquency or teen pregnancy.”

Then, the focus is on definition.  “Quite often what’s needed is not a change in policy but to have the policy interpreted more broadly,” Lyons says.  “Show the common-sense advantages of not changing rules, but of interpreting them more flexibly.  The advantage to all of that is that a finite number of dollars can serve more kids.”

For more information on website about Philadelphia Safe and Sound, click here.  For more articles on this website about after-school programming, click here.