Last month’s outpouring of support to protect pathways to youth thriving was nothing short of amazing. This was not business as usual in Washington. Advocates across the allied youth fields pulled together to make the case not only for the $1.3 billion in Title IV funding that supports afterschool and summer programs, but did so while underscoring the full range of supports for youth and families that are under assault. The messaging – that these locally driven programs are essential to students, working parents and main street – plus mobilization at the local level, helped secure affirmations of support across the political spectrum. It worked. Within three weeks of announcing the hold on the funds, the Administration decided to restore the $1.3 billion for summer and afterschool and released the balance of the withheld $7.8 billion in Title IV funds a few days later. Whether this bodes well for FY2026 funding remains to be seen.
AmeriCorps’ funding story is different but equally challenging. AmeriCorps funds are combined with community funds to put trained volunteer corpsmembers in schools and community youth programs, as well as in communities providing disaster relief and essential community services. And the largest pool of corpsmembers are young adults for whom AmeriCorps serves as a pathway to employment that is financially, socially and personally rewarding. The good news is that AmeriCorps is almost level-funded in the FY2026 appropriations bill thanks to bipartisan support in the Senate. But as of Aug. 4, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is still withholding approximately $200 million in FY25 funding that was appropriated by Congress. A bipartisan group of senators sent a letter to the OMB director urging the agency to release the funds. All undispersed funds are returned to the federal coffers 45 days before the end of the fiscal year.
The people and places funded by these programs are part of a dynamic learning and development ecosystem. While policy and funding are developed in discrete streams, the communities they flow to are intertwined and organic, working to blend and braid funding into a web of supports. What happens in one part of the ecosystem has a ripple effect on other parts. The loss of AmeriCorps funds pulls volunteers out of schools and afterschool programs. The loss of afterschool slots affects school engagement and attendance. The loss of funds for wraparound services and enrichment courses puts pressure on afterschool and summer programs to fill the void. Threats to these programs must be addressed as they appear. But arguments for their existence should emphasize their interdependence, not their uniqueness. From where I sit, I think making these connections helped.
Thirty years ago, when Karen Pittman and I had our short stint leading the President’s Crime Prevention Council, the OMB estimated there were 349 federal programs that communities could tap into to create webs of support for children, youth and families. Years later, when we co-founded the Forum for Youth Investment, we began using a graphic created by Margaret Dunkle to show the crazy quilt of funding sources needed to support a typical low-income family in California. We dubbed the graphic “the spaghetti slide.”
I was reminded of the slide when I rewatched a 2023 interview of Karen Pittman conducted by Elizabeth Gaines, founder and CEO of Children’s Funding Project. Midway into the 20-minute interview, Gaines asks Pittman, “What do you think it’s going to take for us to … get ourselves organized as a field? I’m curious if you have any advice for our field about how to get ourselves working in the same direction better.”
This is a topic Gaines and Pittman have been wrestling with for 20 years. These two trailblazers have known each other for two decades, since Gaines was hired as the Forum for Youth Investment’s first state policy director. Gaines’ field knowledge reinforced Pittman’s academic knowledge. Both believed that the best way to advocate for multiple issues is to communicate why they need to be addressed comprehensively.
Pittman’s quick response (cued up in the full video below) to Gaines’ question was not surprising. With a quick, “I’ve got lots of advice,” she launched into a five-minute summary of why she continues to find the research and community action framework developed by Michelle Gambone and James Connell, Youth Development Strategies, Inc., such a powerful tool for generating community outrage and optimism in under an hour. Pittman shared this research in her last two columns. The clip is worth listening to, even for those who read them.
Recirculating interviews like this one helps us reflect on the tremendous amount of progress all of us have made – advocates, researchers, practitioners, agency administrators, policy makers – toward building the infrastructure needed to “blend and braid” single-problem data, programs and funding into comprehensive and comprehensible webs of support.
Over the last two decades, Pittman continued to hone the research arguments for collaborative advocacy. I worked on training and coaching leaders of community partnerships. Gaines worked on creating policy tools. She spearheaded the creation of both state and local children’s cabinet networks, wrote the book on how to translate agency budgets into children’s budgets and sparked the creation of children’s agendas that spell out positive shared visions for children and youth.
[Related: Trust, time and training: Unlocking the potential of learning ECOsystems]
All of these tools helped communities make better use of the funds they were given. But one more set of tools was needed to give communities strategies to generate their own flexible funding streams, especially to stabilize foundational services like the school and OST enrichment and service corps programs disrupted by the abrupt decisions about federal funding. Children’s Funding Project was birthed to fill this gap.
Now is the time to put all of these infrastructure-building tools to use. Children’s Funding Project has demonstrated that the public is willing to pass referendums to create more equitable, coordinated, sustainable funding for children, youth and families. But this is the last step, not the first step in the infrastructure building. Frameworks like Gambone’s help share the vision and organize the data. Funding streams, like Title IV (that includes 21st Century Community Learning Centers) and AmeriCorps, prime the pump, but the stabilizing power comes from investing in the coordinating structures equipped to manage outcomes and budget data creatively and build the civic infrastructure strong enough to weather storms like the one just experienced.
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Merita Irby, co-founder of the Forum for Youth Investment, is a partner at Knowledge to Power Catalysts.
