Baltimore / Maryland / United States
The Annie E. Casey Foundation, by fostering public policies, human service reforms and community supports, works to better the lives and futures of disadvantaged children and their families in the United States. The foundation concentrates its resources, through grants, to provide the funding capable of furthering their goals. Most recently, this concentration has been in three main areas: improving the existing systems that serve disadvantaged children and families, transforming neighborhoods and promoting social accountability and innovation. In order to affect the child-welfare, mental-health, and other public systems serving disadvantaged children and their families, the organization has been and continues to address the challenges of strengthening distressed neighborhoods, alleviating family poverty, reconnecting fathers and families, providing better health care, and preventing community violence. To transform neighborhoods, the organization seeks to demonstrate ways that states, localities, and neighborhood groups can reorganize themselves and integrate their efforts to support vulnerable families and improve distressed neighborhoods. This particular aspect of their work involves decentralizing large public bureaucracies, pooling funding streams for children and family services across agency lines and formalizing the involvement of communities in the design and delivery of human services. Finally, the foundation promotes findings, ideas, and strategies that help others create and sustain family-supporting communities. In pursuit of this latter goal, the Foundation supports activities that provide data and analysis on issues affecting disadvantaged children and families, as well as the knowledge and tools practitioners, policymakers and citizens can utilize to advance existing efforts. Another of the foundation s efforts, its nationally known Kids Count program, is a national and state-by-state effort seeking to enrich local, state and national discussions concerning ways to secure better futures for all children by tracking the status of children in the U.S. The Annie E. Casey Foundation has been working towards their goals since 1948, when Jim Casey, one of the founders of United Parcel Service, and his siblings, George, Harry, and Marguerite, who named the philanthropic venture in honor of their mother, established it. What began with the foundation s first grants, funding a camp for disadvantaged children in Seattle, Wash., evolved into an organization dedicated to helping children at risk of poor educational, economic, social and health outcomes.
