(PDF Format)

Child Welfare in New York: A Personal Perspective
Letter from former ACT Co-Chair Barbara B. Blum to former ACS Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta citing her perspective on child welfare and the steps needed for reform.

Implementation Project: Building on the Strengths of Families and Neighborhoods, A Public Private Collaborative
Memo by Eric Brettschneider to then ACS Commissioner Nicholas Scoppetta, then ACT Co-Chair Barbara Blum and other ACT Co-Chairs, suggesting next steps toward a neighborhood child welfare strategy.

Ethnic Dimensions in Child Care
Speech presented to the Conference on Child Care in February 1973
by Dr. Andrew Billingsley, professor of sociology, and reprinted April 2006 by Agenda for Children Tomorrow with the permission of Dr. Andrew Billingsley.

Fighting Poverty with Evidence
As part of the New York City Commission for Economic Opportunity Conference, Gordon Berlin delivered a presentation emphasizing the need to utilize evidence in the fight against poverty in an effort to provide solutions that are built around “what we know, not what we hope.”  He noted that three of the foremost causes of persistent poverty are a downward trend in earnings, educational divides in what is now becoming a two-tiered labor market, and the all-time highs in single parenthood.  As suggested by the presentation, any genuine attempts at addressing poverty require both solutions for the short-run (e.g. welfare-to-work, make work pay) and those for the long-run (e.g. k-12 reform, head start, and community college reform); most importantly, any such solutions require coordinated efforts and evidential support.