The Annie E. Casey Foundation today announced the formation of a nonpartisan center to enhance the existing network of state child welfare policy advocates working to achieve comprehensive reforms for children and families involved in child welfare systems. The State Policy Advocacy and Reform Center (SPARC) will engage, build, and support a network of reform-minded child welfare stakeholders.

The Casey Foundation, which dedicates all its resources to promoting a brighter future for the nation’s most vulnerable children, has selected nonprofit First Focus to coordinate SPARC. First Focus is a bipartisan advocacy organization working to make children and families a priority in policy and budget discussions by using the best evidence to inform decisions about investments of public dollars.

A new report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation details how the East Baltimore revitalization initiative has surpassed its goals for minority and women-owned business contracts and has helped place more than 2,700 people in jobs – nearly a third of whom were East Baltimore residents.

The report details how the project used a third-party monitoring system to achieve its impressive results and provides lessons that can guide other large redevelopment projects seeking to promote economic inclusion. In all, 37 percent of the project's $181.7 million in contracts have gone to minority-owned businesses or women-owned enterprises as of December 2010.

The East Baltimore project is working to transform the community through both physical redevelopment and the creation of new economic opportunities for residents.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation today announced the appointment of Ryan Chao, the current executive director of Berkeley, Calif.-based Satellite Housing, as vice president of Civic Sites and Community Change, a position that will oversee the Foundation’s community change investments including its most significant community transformation initiatives in Baltimore and Atlanta.

City and state governments could add more than a million new jobs to the economy and restore prosperity to communities across the country by using a set of 13 innovative ideas advanced by experts and economists. Unveiled in November by the Berkeley Institute for Research on Labor & Employment with the support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation and the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the ideas were presented in a policy brief offering "Big Ideas for Jobs" at a gathering sponsored by the University of California's Washington Center.

A KIDS COUNT Working Paper released by the Annie E. Casey Foundation in November 2011 explores the nation’s changing child population based on data from the 2010 census. While the increase in the number of U.S. children increased only slightly, the demographic shifts within the population were considerable. Some areas of the country (Nevada and Texas, for example) and some demographic groups (including children of mixed race) grew significantly, while the number of children in other areas (Vermont and New York) and in other groups (such as non-Hispanic whites) declined.