New: Blueprint for Improving the Future of Mississippi’s Children
The Children’s Foundation of Mississippi is thrilled to release the Blueprint for Improving the Future of Mississippi’s Children, a data-driven roadmap toward a better future of all Mississippi’s children. This document is the CFM’s signature project and the result of extensive research and analysis, conducted by our team and graduate students from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
We were founded on the belief that for Mississippi to reach its potential, all children of our state must reach their potential. Charting a strategic course toward increasing the success of Mississippi’s children in reaching their potential is at the heart of this document.
To create the Mississippi we want – a flourishing community where everyone has what they need to thrive – we at the Children’s Foundation of Mississippi (CFM) are focusing on the next generation. Because when we do what we can to give our youngest citizens a strong start in life, we create a strong foundation of collective well-being for our community.
Like a GPS, this Blueprint is intended to serve as a guide for directing CFM’s projects and investments and communicating our goals and vision as we chart a course forward as a community. It is meant to be a dynamic, flexible document that will adapt to changing conditions and needs.
This Blueprint is also an invitation to our communities across the state to collaborate. We explore the many domains of health and well-being, holding up innovations and interventions that have been shown to work both here, and in other states, things like data-sharing and prekindergarten collaboratives. In the past year, we have shown that we can meet a crisis with solutions like telehealth, and by coming together as a state (public and private sectors) as part of grassroots movements like the Broadband Enabling Act. Together, we can build on these successes to make further strides to ensure that all children and youth have access to what they need to thrive. We illustrate through hopeful and inspiring examples a vision of the Mississippi we are working to create, and a reminder that we all have a role to play.
By focusing on a few key areas identified by our partners and stakeholders, the CFM hopes to capitalize on
their optimism, interest, and dedication, bringing in resources (and taking advantage of available state and federal funding) and inviting collaboration as needed to create an environment where every child will prosper.
When Mississippi’s children thrive, our state thrives.