Every May, Ascend recognizes the importance of raising awareness about mental health and the multifaceted ways that it impacts family prosperity and well-being.

In the 2020-21 school year, more than 25 million children and youth – roughly half of all elementary and secondary students in the United States – attended schools in school districts that lacked dedicated funding to identify and support students experiencing homelessness.

Homelessness is a traumatic experience with long-term consequences, particularly for infants and toddlers in their most critical stages of development. Yet homelessness among young children is hidden.

In 2020 we launched a dedicated effort to learn more about legal issues surrounding unaccompanied minors experiencing homelessness.

Educators play an important role in supporting students' mental well-being. The pandemic has added incredible layers of stress for both adults and young people.

Trends in Housing Assistance and Who it Serves

Community eligibility allows high-poverty schools and school districts to offer free meals to all students, and it eliminates the need for household school meal applications.

Access to affordable child care can be a major barrier for low-income parents who want to participate in education and training activities to gain skills or obtain employment.

Recent research has begun to focus on the impact of housing instability, in its many forms, on child health and development.

College Promise programs aim to make students believe they can afford college, and to give them the opportunity to go to college and earn degrees without taking on significant debt.

Detroit’s Promise program was designed to encourage college attendance among some of the nation’s most underserved students, those in Detroit, Michigan. The next step was to help students succeed once they enrolled in college.

This annual report analyzes participation in the School Breakfast Program among low-income children nationally and in each state and the District of Columbia for the 2017–2018 school year.

This report marks the thirteenth school year for which the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has collected annual performance data from all states for the Education for Homeless Children and Youth (EHCY) program.

There isn't federal data on food insecurity among college students nationally, so the GAO reviewed 31 studies on the topic, showing that most concluded that over a third of college students don't always have enough to eat.

In an equitable DC, every resident would have the opportunity to prosper. But decades of discriminatory policies and practices have created inequities by ward, neighborhood, and race and ethnicity.

Broadband, especially wireline broadband in American homes, is the essential infrastructure for unlocking the internet’s economic benefits.

There were 33,889 homeless schoolchildren in Florida during the 2007–08 school year, including children temporarily doubled up with others and children staying in hotels, motels, shelters, transitional housing, and unsheltered locations. By the 2015–16 school year, that number had risen to 72,601.

A program called Find the Fit, which combines personalized planning materials and text messaging for students, and training webinars for advisors, increased the number and selectivity of colleges to which students apply.

Over the past decade, chronic absence has gone from being a virtually unknown concept to a national education metric that provides every school in the nation with critical data on how many students are missing so many days of school it jeopardizes their academic success.

Housing and school segregation function as mutually-sustaining phenomena that limit perceived housing and school choices, constrain social networks, and curb employment and educational potential.

Public schools identified more than 1.3 million children and youth experiencing homelessness and enrolled in school at some point in the 2016-2017 school year.1 These numbers do not reflect the total number of children and youth who experience homelessness in the United States.

Based on civil rights data released by the U.S. Department of Education, ProPublica has built an interactive database to examine racial disparities in educational opportunities and school discipline.

CLPHA’s Housing Is Initiative is engaged in a number of cross-sector activities focused on developing partnerships, facilitating a community of practice, resource development, promoting best practices, online collaboration, policy and advocacy, and training and education.

Our initial report—which followed participants around the country over three years—found, among other things, that Year Up increased participants’ average quarterly earnings by more than 50 percent.

We examined the influence of maternal health literacy on child participation in social welfare programs. In this cohort, 20% of the mothers had inadequate or marginal health literacy.