Best Starts for Kids is a community-driven initiative to support every baby born and child raised in King County so they reach adulthood happy, healthy, safe, and thriving. Voters overwhelmingly supported this initiative twice, first in 2015 and again in 2021, with more than 62 percent of the vote, when the initiative introduced additional funding for child care and capital projects.
Through investing in community supports from prenatal development to adulthood, Best Starts catalyzes strong starts in early childhood and sustains those gains as kids progress to adulthood, launching King County’s kids on a path of lifelong health and well-being.
Design and project lead
The Imagine Institute is a nonprofit professional development organization established through collective bargaining between members of SEIU Local 925 and the State of Washington. Imagine strives to support child care access for Washington children by building an accessible, strong, and diverse professional development system that elevates and improves the lives of early childhood educators with culturally-responsive and state-approved training, programs, and support systems. Our mission is to create community relationships and innovative early learning programs that empower people, caring every day for every generation.
Administer wage boost payments
AidKit helps governments and nonprofits build fast, accessible, and fraud-resilient cash aid and benefits programs at scale.
Before AidKit was a company, its founders launched the Left Behind Workers Fund, a pandemic relief program that delivered millions in direct aid to undocumented workers in Colorado. They needed a system to safely and effectively reach these workers in their preferred languages and help them overcome the many barriers they faced in accessing support. It quickly became clear that existing technology solutions were woefully inadequate, so they built our own platform.
AidKit was designed to reach systematically excluded communities with ease and dignity while ensuring their sensitive data stays safe and protected. Today, AidKit is the trusted engine that nonprofits and governments use to operate programs like unemployment assistance, guaranteed basic income, wage subsidies, direct rental assistance, emergency disaster relief, reentry cash, refugee resettlement payments and more. They have distributed almost $250M, reached over 500,000 individuals, and partnered with over 190 governments and nonprofit organizations.
WORK GROUP LEAD:
Provide community- and provider-led Pilot and Research Oversight
Uncommon Bridges is a nationally recognized organizational development, engagement, and policy consulting firm based in Seattle, WA. Established in 2009 as BDS Planning & Urban Design, Uncommon Bridges specializes in building consensus and unlikely coalitions, communicating complex information, demonstrating leading ideas, and shaping organizations.
Research Partner
Cardea is a national, nonprofit, women of color-led organization, based in Seattle, with more than 50 years of experience in social impact evaluation, policy advancement, capacity development, and professional learning. We envision a world in which optimal health and well-being, equity, and justice are realities for all communities, and our mission is to address complex program, policy, and systems issues by co-creating solutions that center community strengths and wisdom. Our team is passionate about the power of evaluations that center equity, social justice, and community voice to share our partners’ successes and drive the changes they seek. Cardea uses a strengths-based approach to elevate and center community voice and wisdom, embedding the principles of equitable evaluation in our work. Cardea’s social impact evaluation team specializes in community-driven, culturally responsive qualitative and quantitative methods, participatory and collaborative evaluation, and data visualization and storytelling. Cardea has been a partner to Best Starts for Kids on a range of evaluation-related initiatives since 2018.
Research Partner
The Urban Institute is a nonprofit research organization that provides evidence and solutions to help shape a more inclusive, equitable, and just society. Urban offers strong research and technical expertise across a range of national social and economic policy issues. We are a trusted source for practitioners, policymakers, and community leaders seeking to improve the well-being of people and places in the US.
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The Imagine Institute believes in grassroots professional development that works for those working in early learning.
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