Discovery Background
The Discovery Birth-to-Eight Initiative
The William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund’s Discovery Initiative aims to engage with all partners in Connecticut and nationally to continue to improve the lives of young children and to achieve the following result:
Connecticut children of all races and income levels are ready for school by age five and are successful learners by age nine.
To achieve this result, families need equal access to quality services for all children. The Memorial Fund and its public-private partners will continue to support community change and policy reform efforts that establish an early childhood education system in Connecticut, including both state and local levels, with communities as full partners from creating the vision through implementation.
The Funding Partnership
The State Office of Early Childhood (OEC), the Children’s Fund of Connecticut (CFC) and the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF) are partnering with the William Caspar Graustein Memorial Fund to advance the Discovery Birth to Age Eight Initiative by aligning their funding for community grants. This investment is an opportunity for communities to continue to build and strengthen their local capacity to develop, enhance and implement a community-wide plan; a plan for creating a system of services and supports that is accessible to and supportive of young children and their families, has measurable results and is jointly owned by a broad sector of community partners. A key premise of the community partnership is that a broad and inclusive community decision-making approach that engages parents, service providers, community leaders and residents is a prerequisite for creating an effective system of services and supports.
A comprehensive community plan focuses on all children birth to age eight and all the service systems that support healthy child development and early school success. The community plan is a road map for assessing and changing institutional policies and practices and provides community-wide accountability for results. It addresses the multiple domains of an early care and education system including: early care, (including infants and toddlers); social, emotional, behavioral and physical health; education (prek-3rd grade) and family support. The plan is a living document that is continually updated in response to changing community conditions and progress toward the results communities seek to achieve.
Guiding Frameworks and tools
The guiding frameworks and tools for the public-private partnership funding include: Community Decision Making (CDM), Results Based Accountability (RBA), the Discovery Community Self-Assessment Tool and the Framework for Child Health Services.
Community Decision Making (CDM)presents research-based lessons on what a community needs to do to achieve results for young children through a process that engages the people most affected by the decisions. A community decision-making process uses data, as well as the perspectives of parents, to understand the conditions of young children in order to develop community-owned strategies for improvement. Data-driven decision making leads to changes at both the systems and program levels. The process of creating a community plan for young children is as important as the actual plan. Community plans are most relevant when the impetus for the plan is locally driven, broadly supported and ownership for implementation and accountability is vested with multiple sectors and constituent groups. The six CDM learning guides (developed by the Center for the Study of Social Policy) will continue to be an important resource for communities and can be found at
Results Based Accountability (RBA) is an effective tool for organizing and implementing a data-driven comprehensive community planning process and is a core element used by the Connecticut legislature and required of state agencies for their planning efforts, especially around early childhood. RBA starts with the end results in mind, uses indicators to report on how well the community is doing and ensures that the community-wide strategies directly address the causes or forces that are currently contributing to poor outcomes. RBA provides a framework to measure both program and system performance, to learn more visit
Community Self-Assessment Toolis based on the experience of Discovery and was put into practice in 2009. Communities use the tool to measure their progress toward strengthening their local early childhood collaborative structure and community decision-making process and can be found at
A Framework for Child Health Services, developed by the Child Health and Development Institute, articulates the full continuum of child health services within the broader early childhood system to ensure optimal child development and school readiness and is accompanied by a Tool Kit that provides a guide for communities for implementing the major recommendations outlined in the Framework. The Framework can be found at
TheFrameworkfor Planning, Implementing, and Evaluating PreK-3rd Grade Approaches, developed byKauerz & Coffman, 2013 provides guidance and questions to support school districts and communities around the country that are striving to establish and sustain an approaches that align early learning programs (birth-to-5) with K-12 systems.Light-touch and sporadic alignment efforts just make adults busier but do not improve the learning opportunities or intentional, coherent instruction provided to young students.Meaningful and comprehensive alignment efforts can lead to improved child outcomes and narrowed achievement gaps.The Framework can be found at