Focus Areas/Projects

A Model Effective Marginal Tax Rate Calculator for Families and Caseworkers

This project aims to support families’ economic mobility. Small increases in families’ earning may lead to losses of key public benefit supports, including tax credits and safety net programs (e.g., Medicaid, SNAP, Child Care Subsidies). The marginal tax rate calculator (MTRC) will be used by families and caseworkers to estimate available federal, state, and local public benefit supports and project families’ net resources as their incomes rise.

Arkansas’ Implementation of Suspension and Expulsion Reduction Policies (ARISE)

This project will examine factors that support or hinder the effective implementation of Arkansas’ innovative policies to promote children’s social-emotional development and reduce expulsion in child care programs.

Career Ladder Identifier and Financial Forecaster (CLIFF)

NCCP is currently partnering with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta (Atlanta Fed) to support their Career Ladder Identifier and Financial Forecaster (CLIFF) initiative.

Disability Perspectives on Paid Leave

This project includes ground-breaking qualitative research about how workers with disabilities and working caregivers of people with disabilities and serious health conditions use, need, and benefit from family and medical leave. 

Economic and Social Challenges of Immigrants in Long Island

From 2017-2020, NCCP conducted a needs assessment and provided actionable recommendations to improve outreach and services for low-income immigrants residing in Long Island. Funding was provided by the New York State Office for New Americans (ONA) Community Navigator Program, through a subcontract with the Central American Refugee Center (CARECEN).  

Expanding Opportunities for Family Engagement

Research has proven that giving parents the tools they need to support a child’s social, emotional, language, and academic progress can be critical to setting a foundation for success. This project tracks research-informed policies and programs that support parents’ engagement in their young children’s learning and development. 

Family Resource Simulator

The first of its kind, the FRS brings modern tools to improve public benefit systems that may fall short in supporting low-income families’ economic mobility. The FRS arms decisionmakers with information about barriers to economic mobility within public benefit rules, such as cliff effects (i.e., large losses in supports due to small wage increases); interactions between eligibility rules that lead to unanticipated losses of benefits; and gaps in supports that impede employment. 

Improving Oral Health and Oral Health Care for Adults with IDD in New Jersey 

This project, funded by the WITH foundation, identifies barriers to high quality oral healthcare among adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in New Jersey.  

Improving Public Benefits in New Jersey

Working with two New Jersey organizations, NCCP will create a family resource simulator specifically for New Jersey that will seek to inform pressing, actionable policy issues that could positively affect NJ’s low-income or underserved populations.

Early Childhood Two-Generation State Policy Profiles

The Early Childhood Two-Generation State Policy Profiles provide a state-by-state picture of the population of young children and the policy choices that states make across three areas: health and development, early care and education, and family economic support. 

Making Sufficient Oral Healthcare for People with IDD a Cost-Effective Reality

People with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) experience poorer oral health and more difficulty in finding, getting to, and paying for appropriate oral health care, relative to people without IDD. This project will assess, by state, the availability of Medicaid-funded oral health coverage for adults with IDD, including oral health care provided through Medicaid waivers, and examine the impact of increasing Medicaid-funded oral health coverage on service use and cost. 

New Hampshire Preschool Development Grant Needs Assessment

The National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) is collaborating with stakeholders across New Hampshire to undertake a multi-year Needs Assessment to identify the supports New Hampshire families with young children, particularly marginalized and underserved families, need and barriers to accessing those supports.  

Paid Family and Medical Leave Research

NCCP has conducted research on paid family and medical leave (PFML) to identify policies that work well for low-income families with children. NCCP’s research focuses on the states that have passed their own PFML programs.

PRiSM: Promoting Research-informed State Infant-Early Childhood Mental Health Policies and Scaled Initiatives

PRiSM helps advocates and policymakers identify many of the most promising strategies states are using to promote infant-toddler mental health. PRiSM has an online, searchable collection of research-informed IECMH policies and scaled initiatives along with summaries of research about key IECMH strategies

Supporting Children of Immigrants in an Era of Harsh Immigration Policy

This research, conducted in 2018, examined key barriers to public benefits faced by low-income immigrant families in this enforcement context, and it provides strategies to mitigate these barriers.

Supporting Young Children’s Mental Health

This project aims to highlight opportunities, strategies, and current state efforts to promote young children’s mental health. From infancy onward, young children’s mental health plays a critical role in early learning and development. Essential supports for young children’s mental health should be widely available – in health care settings, home-visiting and community parenting programs, in early care and education settings, and through other community-based services. 

The Effect of State Immigration Policies on Health Care for Children of Immigrants

This research examined whether states’ driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants and local sanctuary policies increase the likelihood that children of immigrants receive adequate health care.

The Effects of State Immigration Policies on Preschool Enrollment of Children of Immigrants 

This study assesses the impact of state immigration enforcement policies and driver’s license policies for undocumented immigrants on the preschool enrollment of children of immigrants.

Past projects can be found in the NCCP Projects Archive