Children, Families, Work and Community are the cornerstones of our American society. Our goal is that by the year 2020, parents can better balance their family and work lives and that our economy can sustain quality jobs and full health benefits. In the next decade, we hope all children can grow up in safe and stable families and that strong communities provide the many social services needed to achieve a quality education leading to good jobs and prosperous futures. To reach these goals, our projects work on issues that promote:
- protecting children
- supporting young people
- helping families help themselves
- improving the workplace
- building communities
SPARK www.wkkf.org/spark Working with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation on its SPARK Initiative, CCMC (as a resource organization) is helping to ensure that American children who start school each year are prepared to learn. SPARK is a six-year initiative built around Supporting Partnerships to Assure Ready Kids that unites communities so that all children can be successful in learning before and after they enter school. SPARK fosters partnerships of selected communities, schools, state agencies and families to ensure that they work together effectively for the early learning of children. With the initiative serving as a catalyst or spark, the goal is to ensure that vulnerable children are ready for school and that schools are ready for children. The initiative is now at the midway point and has grantees in eight locations: District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina and Ohio. SPARK is based on four key principles:
- Strong partnerships among families, providers, community organizations and ready schools ensure that all children can learn and succeed in school.
- Quality is a critical element of a child's early learning, from birth through the early years of school.
- Parents and families at home and working with early-care providers are critical to ensuring that children succeed in school.
- School leaders and teachers, working with the community's support, can create smooth transitions from early-learning settings so that children can succeed in school.
Also related: Linking Ready Kids to Ready Schools: Building Policy on State and Community Successes. www.readykidsreadyschools2009.org
Children Family Work News www.cfwnews.org Children Family Work News (CFW) disseminates full-text articles on child welfare, early education and low-wage work issues from LexisNexis from more than 36,000 publications. CFW allows subscribers, including advocates, policymakers and journalists, to view full unedited text of recent news articles in one e-mail after they select the exact topics and geographical areas they are interested in. Users subscribed to children and familiy issues receive clips every weekday while those subscribed to low-wage work topics receive clips on Monday and Thursdays. CFW adds no text or commentary.
Fairness Initiative on Low-Wage Work www.lowwagework.org For generations, Americans shared a tacit understanding that if you worked hard, a livable income and basic securities would be yours. That promise has been broken. Today, more than 30 million men and women in this country work in jobs that pay poverty wages and provide few, if any, benefits. To combat this situation, CCMC organized a national communications and advocacy effort with more than 20 organizations working on a range of issues related to low-wage work. We are shifting the public debate from stories concentrating on individual workers to a more systemic look at low-wage work. Through this initiative, we are generating public debate, informing the news media, improving and increasing news coverage, strengthening the capacity of advocacy groups to deliver new messages, and moving policy objectives at the local, state and national levels. This initiative is supported by the Ford Foundation. 
Family to Family CCMC helps the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s drive to reform child welfare agencies. The initiative provides practical tools for states and communities to redesign and reconstruct their child welfare systems. CCMC provides a variety of services including crisis management assistance, media readiness training, and strategic communications planning. 
Independent Court www.independentcourt.org Working with the Coalition for a Fair and Independent Judiciary, CCMC has helped keep the public dialogue on judicial nominations balanced and fair since 2001. CCMC provides media support to coalition members, especially members who seek a voice in the public dialogue on nominations to the federal court, but who have few communications resources. CCMC also provides electronic news clips on these issues to hundreds of nonprofit activist across the country on a regular basis. The Open Society Institute funds CCMC's work in this area. 
The Census Project www.thecensusproject.org Nearly everyone in the U.S. relies upon the essential demographic and economic information the Census Bureau collects. State and local governments need census information to plan for roads and transit systems, schools, healthcare facilities, senior citizens and daycare centers, and to monitor the progress of their communities. Civil rights and community organizations monitor the data to determine whether all segments of the population are treated fairly in the apportionment of public and private resources. Even media organizations rely on census data to provide unbiased, credible information for their reporting and analysis of the news.
CCMC's Census Project is a multi-year effort that involves more than 20 stakeholder groups who use census data. The focus of the project is to obtain full federal funding for the Census Bureau's American Community Survey (ACS) the replacement for the decennial long form. When fully implemented toward the end of the decade, the ACS will provide official data every year, instead of once-a-decade. The project is supported by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Population Reference Bureau.