The National Governors Association (NGA) and its partner, the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), today announced that five states—Colorado, Georgia, Minnesota, New Jersey and Oregon—were selected to participate in an opportunity to create two-generation strategies for systems change. Two-generation strategies seek to simultaneously promote children’s learning and healthy development while promoting the parents’ success as both caregivers and breadwinners.

Selected states will participate in technical assistance and peer networking and receive financial support to develop and implement a two-generation plan to achieve statewide systems change across a range of policy areas, including workforce development, human services, education, health, child care and early childhood education.

The opportunity, Parents and Children Thriving Together: Two-Generation State Policy Network, is supported by grants from the Annie E. Casey, W.K. Kellogg and Doris Duke Charitable Foundations. The ultimate goal of the network is to reform policies and service delivery to better meet the needs of children and parents together in order to advance child well-being and family economic security.

This initiative will be a highly interactive process meant to serve as a catalyst for policy change. Through governors’ offices and participating state agencies, state officials will work to ensure that programs and services better support low-income families as a whole.

To learn more about NGA’s Economic, Human Services and Workforce Division, click here.

To learn more about the Center for Law and Social Policy, click here.

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The Annie E. Casey Foundation creates a brighter future for the nation’s children by developing solutions to strengthen families, build paths to economic opportunity and transform struggling communities into safer and healthier places to live, work and grow. For more information, visit www.aecf.org.

The Doris Duke Charitable Foundation seeks to improve the quality of people’s lives through grants supporting the performing arts, environmental conservation, medical research and child well-being, and through preservation of the cultural and environmental legacy of Doris Duke’s properties. The mission of the Child Well-being Program is to promote children’s healthy development and protect them from abuse and neglect. For more information, visit www.ddcf.org.

The W.K. Kellogg Foundation places the optimal development of children at the center of all they do and calls for healing the profound racial gaps and inequities that exist in our communities. They believe that concentrating their resources on early childhood (prenatal to age 8), within the context of families and communities, offers the best opportunity to dramatically reduce the vulnerability caused by poverty and racial inequity over time. For more information, visit www.wkkf.org.