Communications support, community outreach, public-private partnerships, and engagement with government entities are some of the other key components to effective advocacy approaches from which foundations can learn from. Below are a series of reports that touch on those topics and pull lessons from the experiences of other funders. 

Embedding Communications Support in Advocacy Strategies 

Foundations that fund advocacy increasingly understand the important role communications play in advancing policy. But foundations big and small often have limited communications capacity – and what communications expertise they do have isn’t always integrated into their advocacy grantmaking strategies. Strategy Behind the Design of Advocacy Communications Support is a resource for foundation staff who are grappling with how to design and implement effective communications approaches into their advocacy grantmaking.

Ending the School-to-Prison Pipeline: A cross-sector Push foR Reform 

For years, funders, advocates and public-sector partners have been working in close collaboration to reform the school discipline system that disproportionately targets children of color and puts students on a path to prison instead of higher education. Tilling the Field: Lessons About Philanthropy’s Role in School Discipline Reform offers a history of the movement, the achievements made thus far and insights that can inform future school discipline reform efforts and other policy change movements. The report is meant as a guide for philanthropies seeking to partner with government stakeholders to advance policy reform as well as a resource for federal agency staff to build understanding of the value of collaboration with philanthropic institutions.

Covering Families, One School At a Time

Community organizations, health care providers, school leaders, and other civic sector actors have used a variety of school-based outreach strategies to find children and family members who could be eligible for free or low-cost health insurance coverage. This tactic has proven fruitful, as nearly half of the nation’s uninsured people who are eligible for Medicaid or the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) live in families with at least one school-aged child. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities’ “Guide to School-Based Outreach for Health Coverage Enrollment” describes the main ingredients of successful school-based outreach programs so that new and experienced practitioners alike can benefit from successful enrollment efforts.