Achievements

Right from the beginning, CCMC has succeeded by nurturing collaboration. CCMC's inaugural project, The Great American Family Tour, was launched to make family policy part of the 1988 presidential campaign.

This pioneering effort reached citizens, policymakers, political leaders and advocates to put family policy issues front and center in the national spotlight.

Targeted media markets received high-visibility visits from noted child development experts and advocates including Dr. T. Berry Brazelton and Family Ties creator David Goldberg. The results included cover stories about family issues in Newsweek and USA Today and on the major TV networks.

Thanks in part to these efforts, family policy issues are now a staple of American political debate. The passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act in 1993 was one result of this consensus on family needs.

Since 1988, CCMC and its partners have scored some major victories:

  • Increased federal support for child care, including $2 billion in earmarked funds in the welfare reform package signed by President Clinton in 1996;
  • A $1 billion federal program called Family Preservation and Support Services, originally included in the 1993 federal budget and now a part of child welfare programs across the United States;
  • A successful 1994 campaign to continue federal child welfare entitlements for foster care and adoption assistance, when nearly all other assistance programs were cut and absorbed into block grants to the states;
  • A 1995-1997 collaborative effort that resulted in the revamping of the nation’s adoption laws to make it easier to move tens of thousands more children out of foster care and into permanent homes every year;
  • A sustainable energy campaign that since 1988 has helped shift about $1 billion away from polluting technology into renewable energy development to benefit consumers, the environment and energy companies;
  • New policies adopted in 1994 in Cairo by the United Nations International Conference on Population and Development that include not only family planning but also reproductive health, women's education and women's rights as critical to slowing population growth;
  • A Women's Rights Are Human Rights campaign that successfully redefined human rights to include an end to violence against women, both at the U.N. Human Rights Conference in Vienna in 1993 and at the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995;
  • A three-year campaign in partnership with the National Immigration Forum that trained hundreds of immigrants across the country to use the media to fight back against the anti-immigrant backlash of the early 1990s and supported a national strategy team of immigration advocates in an aggressive strategy that enabled them to frame the public debate on immigration;
  • A CCMC-created partnership of six leading learning disabilities organizations called the Coordinated Campaign for Learning Disabilities that from 1996 to 2004 leveraged more than $250 million in public service advertising, provided information to over 1 million families with learning-disabled children and increased membership in the partner groups by 35 percent;
  • A follow-on initiative coordinated by CCMC that currently is connecting the early care community with the learning disability community to ensure that 3-to-4-year-olds are assessed for potential learning disabilities nationwide;
  • A coordinated media and outreach campaign, including paid advertising, news conferences and placements of editorials and op-eds, that helped win restoration of $25 million in U.S. funding for UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund in 1999;
  • A multi-year collaboration, Census 2000, that built public support for a fair and accurate 2000 census; for scientific sampling to reveal the chronic undercount of people of color; for the long form to gather the data necessary to shape and fund effective federal, state and local policy and programs;
  • A follow-on initiative to ensure congressional funding for the groundbreaking American Community Survey (ACS), the U.S. Census Bureau's replacement for the decennial long form, of which this initiative is credited with preserving hundreds of millions of federal dollars earmarked for the ACS;
  • A seven-state collaborative of child advocacy organizations that used strategic communications to help argue for hundreds of millions of new dollars for pre-K in those states, which was coordinated by CCMC and included 20 regular planning meetings among the states from 2000-2005 as well as more than 50 workshops and on-site consultations over the same timeframe;
  • The Fairness Initiative on Low-Wage Work, a current collaboration among 20 nonprofit organizations across the country working on low-wage work issues, has successfully reframed media coverage of poverty, the working poor, and low-income work to the more empowering term low-wage work;
  • A multi-year collaboration for the upcoming census that has successfully defeated congressional attempts for three straight years to reduce the budget for Census 2010 by tens of millions of dollars; and
  • Working with the Women Donors Network, development of an expanded values-based frame, backed by extensive public opinion research that CCMC commissioned, to broaden support for reproductive and other health issues, of which 1,000 individuals from 450 organizations have been briefed on the findings in 2006-2007.