Reviewing the Promise Neighborhood Hopefuls

Two-hundred thirty-four organizations applied for this year’s Promise Neighborhoods competitive grant program, according to information released this month by the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services. The applicants are competing for 14 to 16 grants that will draw from a pool of $30 million in fiscal year 2011 funding.

The program, which President Obama first mentioned during his 2008 campaign, is now in its second year. It also generated a lot of interest in 2010, when 340 applicants applied for 10 available one-year planning grants.

Promise Neighborhoods is the Obama administration’s attempt to break the poverty cycle by creating “pipelines” of comprehensive care and education for disadvantaged children. The program is modeled on the Harlem Children’s Zone, which includes two charter schools, after-school enrichment programs for kids of all ages, and a “baby college,” which teaches parenting skills to pregnant moms and their partners. The grants available through Promise Neighborhoods, however, are significantly lower than the Harlem Children Zone’s annual budget of about $70 million, much of which comes from private philanthropies.

One-hundred ninety-nine of this year’s applicants are competing for 10 one-year planning grants, which will be funded at up to $500,000 each. The remaining 35 applicants are competing for four to six implementation grants, which will cover three to five years of programming. Ed and HHS envision awarding each implementation grantee $4 to $6 million per year. Presumably, some of these implementation grants will go to the existing 21 planning grantees that have spent the past year building their proposals for Promise Neighborhoods.

Applicants must address two of four “competitive preference priorities” in their applications: early learning, Internet connectivity, arts and humanities, and quality affordable housing. Early learning was the most popular choice, with 70 percent of planning grant applicants and 86 percent of implementation grant applicants choosing to address early learning.

The applicants, which include social service non-profits, institutions of higher education and school districts are located overwhelmingly in urban areas. The Ounce of Prevention Fund of Florida applied for a grant to create “Model Sites” in four different communities across the state that will take a “results-based accountability” approach to creating a cradle-to-career pipeline, with The Ounce providing data management and evaluation tools to partner community organizations. Other proposals focus more on integrating existing organizations within a small community. In New Jersey, the Paterson YMCA plans to partner with existing community organizations such as the local public library, United Way, public schools and an early childhood center to create cradle-to-career support. The University of Kentucky Research Foundation was one of the few applicants under the “rural communities” priority. Their proposal would focus on improving early child care and K-12 education in two isolated Appalachian counties that have been particularly hard-hit by the recession.

As exciting as these proposals are, there are reasons to be cautious. Not only are the Promise Neighborhood grants relatively small, but there’s no knowing whether communities will be able to sustain progress they might make after the federal funding runs dry. Five years, the maximum length of the grants that Ed and HHS plan to award, is not long enough to see even one class of children through a cradle-to-career pipeline. And there are no guarantees that the Promise Neighborhood competition will even be funded in the coming years; the fledgling program has consistently received far less money than the president’s annual budget has proposed, and has been on the chopping block multiple times during debt ceiling negotiations over the past year.

The final reason for concern is that the evidence on the Harlem Children’s Zone itself is mixed. It’s currently unclear whether children in the HCZ neighborhood have benefitted from the cradle-to-career pipeline approach; the social, health and parenting services provided to families in the Harlem Children’s Zone; the extraordinary passion and leadership provided by HCZ and its founder, Geoffrey Canada; or simply the high-quality charter schools HCZ operates. In this sense, the Promise Neighborhoods program is actually a great laboratory to try several approaches to cradle-to-career education and see what, if anything, makes a significant difference in the lives of children from low-income families.

CORRECTION 11/1/2011: The original post erroneously stated that 340 entities had applied for grants in 2011. The correct number is 234.