2010 Voter's Guide & Packard Advocacy Issue Briefs

Dear Partners,                                            

We wanted to let you know about NEACH's 2010 New England Voter's Guide on children's issues and the release of two new issue briefs from the David and Lucille Packard Foundation.

2010 New England Voter's Guide

NEACH is very excited to announce that we will once again be collaborating with partners in each New England state to send all of the region's Congressional candidates a questionnaire on children's issues. This year, we are also sending questionnaires to gubernatorial candidates. As we did in 2008, NEACH will compile candidate responses into an interactive online voter's guide that features a tool allowing voters to directly contact candidates with opinions about their positions.

The project is moving forward on schedule and we anticipate unveiling the 2010 New England Voter's Guide during the middle of October. Once it is released, we will be asking all of you to raise awareness about this educational election season tool among your networks in order to ensure that it is distributed as widely as possible. The 2008 voter's guide went out to about 10,000 people and we believe that we can reach even more people this time around with your help! Please start thinking now about distribution strategies and which other organizations in your state can help with this effort. Thank you in advance for your assistance with this project.

David and Lucille Packard Foundation Issue Briefs

The David and Lucille Packard Foundation recently released two issue briefs about what makes child health advocates successful. The reports' findings were gleaned from an evaluation of the Packard Foundation's Insuring America's Children: States Leading the Way (IAC) grantmaking program.

The first of these briefs, State-Based Advocacy as a Tool for Expanding Children's Coverage: Lessons from Site Visits to Six IAC Grantee States, highlights the strategies used by effective state-based child health advocates. The brief examines each of these strategies in significant detail and demonstrates that the right advocacy strategies can achieve gains for our children even during severe economic downturns.

The second brief, Strategic Engagement of Policymakers is Key to Advancing a Children's Health Care Coverage Policy Agenda, takes a deeper look at a specific strategy described in the first issue brief-identifying and building relationships with champions for children's coverage.

If you have any questions about either our 2010 New England Voter's Guide or the Packard issue briefs, please do not hesitate to contact me at (617) 275-2929 or arosenthal@communitycatalyst.org.

Sincerely,

Amy Rosenthal
Project Director