Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet
PCC's mission is to connect all members of the Poughkeepsie community who support children in order to create and coordinate a system of cradle-to-career services, supports and opportunities that ensures every child can thrive.
Poughkeepsie, New York
Poughkeepsie, New York
The leaders of the Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet knew their community had untapped potential.
Poughkeepsie, New York is rich with opportunity, not just because it’s close to New York City, but because the community’s history as an industrial shipping center. Despite this potential, intergenerational poverty and educational inequity have held the community back.
In February 2020, The Poughkeepsie Children’s Cabinet formed to directly address the root causes of these two intertwined, deeply rooted community problems. The cabinet brought together schools, nonprofits, and government officials, all of whom agreed on a shared goal — that by 2033, they would connect more than 5,000 young people and their families to real opportunities that lead to postsecondary education completion and socioeconomic mobility.
To reach that North Star goal, the Cabinet knew they needed to identify concrete outcomes that would guide their strategies and collaboration. And this process required community buy-in.
To achieve this, the Cabinet partnered with Finding Common Purpose (FCP) to establish a publicly available, community-informed data dashboard that tracks outcomes on youth wellbeing from cradle-to-career. This dashboard has become PCC’s central tool for tracking community-wide progress on outcomes for children from birth through career and ensuring that progress toward the North Star goal is visible to the community. Initial feedback from the community revealed the metrics they chose to measure employment were not resonating with the community’s experiences, nor was it measuring what the cabinet had hoped it would.
Based on this feedback, FCP funded a year of work to support the Cabinet in strengthening the employment benchmark. This resulted in a whole new metric: a quantitative definition of “thriving wage” in Poughkeepsie. This metric didn’t just rely on existing modes of determining success but included the array of expenses that make up a family’s wage needs.
To pressure-test the thriving wage definition, FCP is funding continuous community-engagement work in Poughkeepsie. The Cabinet has shared the updated metrics with community members — families, employers and jobseekers — through “data walks” that connect the numbers to the community’s lived experience. Through these walks, the Cabinet shares findings, explains the methodology, and collects qualitative input, all of which shapes how the metric is defined, used, and talked about.
FCP’s funding has also allowed the Cabinet to invest in community members as facilitators who can train residents to lead listening sessions to introduce the dashboard and help neighbors understand their own roles in reaching the community’s shared goals. This investment is vital for the longevity of the Cabinet’s community dashboard as well as the resonance and influence that is only possible by building trusting relationships.
The Cabinet’s approach offers a model for the field. Data dashboards are only as durable as the community engagement behind them — and the Cabinet’s investment in building that community, not just the tool, is what positions this work to last. FCP’s investments in building PCC’s data infrastructure and community engagement ensure that the community is measuring and aligning on what matters. Looking ahead, FCP will be investing in PCC’s media engagement and storytelling, ensuring that the learnings from prior phases of work are not siloed but are used to impact how data is interpreted and communicated to advance PCC’s north star goals.
"Finding Common Purpose's support of our data dashboard work allowed us to demonstrate our commitment to data-driven decision making, and create useful metrics that encourage our partners to do the same. Even more importantly, these conversations have improved our ability to be clear about our 'so what' and think meaningfully about the role each initiative plays in contributing to the ways that youth are thinking about careers."
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