Saturday, May 24, 2014

Table of Contents First Five After Eight

I have materials on the following topics:

Development of Marin County's First Five Strategic Plan - 2000

CCFC Trust Funds

Initiation of the First Five Commissions

Development of the First Five Association

Minimum County Funding Decision

Prenatal to Five

Births to County Residents

Initial Staff and Operational Funding by Counties
     
First Commissioners

Citizen Engagement in Strategic Planning


Friday, May 23, 2014

$8 billion and 8 million kids

Greetings!

After eight billion dollars, and 8 million children born in California during the past 16 years, it's time to revisit the results of Proposition 10, the California Children and Families Initiative of 1998 (First Five) Commissions.  Originally, as you will see from the title and previous posts on this blog, I was planning to conduct this review eight years ago.  The consensus among some I contacted was that it was too early in the life of First Five to hold it accountable for impacts of its actions.  We were also concerned that much critical evaluation might add fuel to the efforts of the tobacco industry to weaken its capabilities.  And then there was the movements by the Governor and the Legislature to transfer funds from its Trust Fund.

So we decided to wait a bit.  Now, as the Trust Fund has been diminished (you'll remember we established it so we could continue stable program funding while the sale and use of tobacco products was being reduced), we feel it time to examine the impact of the Initiative.

We'll use the questions I posed in the beginning, and the research conducted by First Five Commissions, to evaluate our performance.

Gregory Fearon