December 2003

Children wanting to participate in after-school activities, teens looking for jobs and young families in crisis are among the early beneficiaries of Baltimore’s Reason to Believe Enterprise.

The Reason to Believe Enterprise includes more than 30 Baltimore organizations – foundations, businesses, civic and advocacy groups – that will raise $30 million over the next two years to leverage public funds to increase and sustain opportunities that can improve conditions and outcomes for five of the city’s most vulnerable populations. Established in May 2003, Reason to Believe has already raised $22 million, and $6.5 million has been allocated.

Baltimore’s Safe and Sound Campaign is a co-founder of Reason to Believe. Safe and Sound’s board chair, Annie E. Casey Foundation President Douglas W. Nelson, is a co-chair of Reason to Believe. Mayor Martin O’Malley and Eddie C. Brown, chairman of Brown Capital Management, are also co-chairs. The Casey Foundation has invested $7.5 million in the enterprise. The Baltimore Community Foundation and the Open Society Institute have each pledged $5 million; The Aaron and Lillie Straus Foundation, the City of Baltimore, the Greater Baltimore Committee and individual donors make up the balance thus far.

Taking a leadership role in Reason to Believe is a critical next step for Baltimore’s Safe and Sound Campaign.

“Safe and Sound has played the roles of ‘convincer’ and ‘illuminator’ with respect to Reason to Believe,” says Hathaway Ferebee, executive director of Safe and Sound. “We’ve illuminated the fact that conditions for kids and families are unacceptable. We also work tirelessly to convince all segments of the city that those conditions can change. With our partners we developed a plan, guided by data and best practices, and proved that it can reduce social as well as economic costs to the city.”

Ferebee notes that Reason to Believe accomplishes a central component of Safe and Sound’s systems change plan, which is to cultivate civic leadership to leverage the clout necessary to bring the Campaign's successful efforts to scale and sustain them. In addition, it is a vehicle for raising bridge funding for Safe and Sound's strategies (after-school, home visitation, reading and homicide reduction) until long term changes in public policy and funding are secured.

Reason to Believe is a mechanism to ensure that the conditions of children, youth, families and their healthy development become the city’s top priority. “Until this became something that the city’s leadership points to as THE goal for the city, this plan would always be seen as nice and important, but on the margins and not the central focus of the city,” says Ferebee. “We don’t see this as just a ‘kids agenda’ but as the city’s top agenda.”

The enterprise is also an outgrowth of Mayor O’Malley’s Baltimore Believe campaign to generate greater public engagement. “The Believe campaign opened people’s eyes to things they really didn’t want to see, and we needed to do that,” he says. “Now, we’re opening people’s eyes to the positive things that they can not only believe in, but build on.”

To demonstrate to all Marylanders that with sound investments in opportunity, conditions can improve and government can save money, Reason to Believe is investing in proven interventions for the most vulnerable children and families:

• Young families in crisis;
  
• Preschoolers lacking the preparation needed for school success;
  
• Disconnected adolescents with a high likelihood of harming themselves or others;
  
• Recovering addicts and re-entering ex-offenders with dependent children;
  
• Families living in neighborhoods where their safety is routinely threatened.

“This is not just a fund-raising effort – it is recognition that all people need basic opportunities to lead healthy, productive lives,” says Ferebee. “It is the enterprise’s position that government should provide these opportunities not only because it is the right thing to do, but also because it is the smart thing to do. It is believed that investments in effective solutions like these can be proven to reduce the high cost of Baltimore's heavy reliance on deep-end punitive and remedial interventions.”

“There is no private-money that by itself can solve the needs of these families and kids, but if we’re willing to spend our own money on them, no one can say we’re just playing around with public appropriations,” says Casey’s Nelson. “The enterprise intends to convince state officials that the $30 million is not meant to replace government dollars but to attract them to programs deemed worthy of private investment.”

A centerpiece of the enterprise’s effort to secure greater public investments is its Compact for Sound Government. Generally, through this proposal, as investments in opportunities increase, the government would save money by avoiding expensive remedial interventions. These savings would then be captured in a revolving fund and a portion of the avoided costs be directed towards sustaining and expanding the efforts.

The compact would focus on certain areas of expenditures where savings could be expected. For example, one possibility is to increase the number of residential substance abuse treatment slots and other appropriate supports for substance abusing women with children to ensure that more children can safely remain in their families, and avoid placement in foster care. The average cost of an in-patient residential substance abuse treatment episode for a woman and her children is $22,500 – compared to the $50,000 per child average cost of a foster care placement.

Reason to Believe is working with Governor Robert Ehrlich’s staff on the compact, says Robin Wood, Safe and Sound’s deputy director. “It’s a fiscally prudent state and local partnership that is a new way of doing business to achieve important goals,” she says. “Ultimately, it’s about investing scarce public resources wisely, to achieve specific results for kids.”

For more information on this website about Baltimore’s Safe and Sound Campaign, click here.