Federal Support to Help Neighborhoods Thrive: Promise Neighborhoods Grantees

 

Today, the Institute of Education Sciences released Federal Support to Help Neighborhoods Thrive: Services, Challenges, and Outcomes of Promise Neighborhoods Grantees (NCEE 2026-006).   Children in the nation’s most distressed neighborhoods often face complex, interconnected challenges stemming from persistent poverty and a lack of coordinated supports and services to help them achieve. The Promise Neighborhoods program aims to improve the academic and developmental outcomes of these children by enabling a grantee organization and its partners to identify priority needs and deliver associated services. Representing the U.S. Department of Education’s largest commitment to “place-based” funding, the program invests substantial resources in struggling communities to address their potentially wide-ranging but specific difficulties. This report assesses the first 25 Promise Neighborhood grantees, covering awards between 2011 and 2018. The report describes these grantees and their neighborhoods and assesses how grantees sought to address neighborhood needs and navigate potential implementation challenges. For grantees that received awards in 2011 and 2012, the report also examines whether children living in Promise Neighborhoods experienced changes in educational outcomes.  Findings include:  The first decade of grantees and their neighborhoods varied in resources and scale; despite these differences, neighborhoods often had high rates of poverty and high-priority needs related to improving children’s academic skills and kindergarten readiness.   Most grantees allocated a majority of their funds to adding and expanding service offerings in their Promise Neighborhoods. Services were intended to address a broad set of needs as required by the program, not just the highest priority needs of their neighborhoods.  Most grantees reported that it was difficult to implement and monitor Promise Neighborhoods services due to a lack of school and district involvement, and many grantees faced broader grant management challenges as well.  Even though educational outcomes are central to the program, changes in math and English language arts achievement, attendance, and high school graduation during the grant years were similar for schools in early Promise Neighborhoods and other comparable schools.  To access the report, please visit: https://ies.ed.gov/use-work/resource-library/report/evaluation-report/federal-support-help-neighborhoods-thrive-services-challenges-and-outcomes-promise-neighborhoods.