Success By 6^®

United Way of Greater Cincinnati leads a collaborative effort to make sure that all children ages 0-6 are healthy and ready to succeed by the time they start kindergarten. Created in 2003, United Way's Success By 6^® has served as a backbone convener and champion for our community's youngest generation. Success By 6^®, convened in the aftermath of the 2001 civil unrest in Cincinnati, was designed as a collaborative effort initiated by United Way of Greater Cincinnati, to ensure that all children ages 0-6 are healthy and ready to succeed by the time they start kindergarten.

Since its inception, United Way's Success By 6^® championed a movement that created supporters and investors in the quality of early education and generated care for the youngest in our community.

Most notably we did this by setting community-level goals. Following the "Great Recession" of 2007-2009, United Way of Greater Cincinnati convened more than four dozen community partner organizations from across the Greater Cincinnati area in 2010 with the task to co-create a collective vision for what a thriving region should look like by 2020. In 2011, United Way unveiled the outcome of this process: six data-informed aspirational Bold Goals in the areas of education, income and health. Our Bold Goal to ensure more children were ready for Kindergarten built off the early foundation of work that Success By 6^® had been leading in the community–including establishing a baseline, measured in 2006, of 44 percent of kids showing up ready to learn.

United Way's persistence and investments in services, collaborations and advocacy to ensure that all children ages 0-6 are healthy and ready to succeed, by the time they start kindergarten, catalyzed well-known services throughout our community–such as Every Child Succeeds–and laid the groundwork for critical systemic change–like the passing and recent renewal of Cincinnati Preschool Promise.

United Way has used a variety of strategies:

• Public campaigns, like Born Learning, to raise awareness of the important role that every parent plays as their child's first teacher
• We've estimated that we've invested more than $125 million
• Our advocacy efforts, most significantly in Ohio and Kentucky, supported early state-level standardization of kindergarten assessments, increased public funding in early education and reduced barriers around challenges like the benefits cliff for families accessing public benefits to support child care. The systems are not perfect, but advocacy has resulted in a less steep reduction of benefits, often referred to as tapered reduction, as families increase their income.

• From day one, we invested in data–initially by tracking the number of quality rated providers in our region–between 2007 to 2013 there has been a 208% increase in the number of quality-rated early care and education centers in our region (moving from just 42 providers or 14% to 194–35% in 2013 and now, in Ohio, to statewide policy requiring early education providers to be quality rating in order to accept families using child care benefits
• Since 2010, kindergarten readiness scores across Cincinnati Public Schools, measured by the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment, have increased by 9%, moving from 53% to 62%.
• Our landmark longitudinal study demonstrates that students who are ready for kindergarten have greater academic success across important milestones between kindergarten and high school.