Showing Where Early Childhood Services Are Needed Most
Summary
Head Start and Early Head Start programs needed clear, defensible evidence of where families in their service areas needed early childhood services most. Zip-level needs assessments and a custom scoring formula ranked every area by need. The programs used the rankings in grant applications that won millions in awards.
The Client
Head Start and Early Head Start grant recipients serving a major U.S. city and a U.S. territory.
The Challenge
Federal rules require Head Start programs to assess the needs of the communities they serve. These programs covered large, varied service areas, and they had to show precisely where need was concentrated so they could make the case for where services should go. The data they needed was spread across many federal, state, and local sources that don’t line up neatly with one another.
What We Did
We assembled and cleaned data from the American Community Survey, CDC, Department of Education, Feeding America, and state and local sources at the zip code level. We combined it into a single needs database covering economic, education, health, and food security indicators. Then we built a scoring formula that weighed those indicators together and ranked every area in the service region by need.
The Outcome
The report showed where in the process people were losing access to charity care and who was most affected.
Strategic Impact
The needs assessments became the evidence base for multiple grant applications, which won awards totaling millions of dollars.