Thirty-five years of experience investing in Denver communities tells us that we can’t do the work in the Children’s Corridor alone. And no single institution or initiative, however effective, can produce the sea change in outcomes for children that we believe are both necessary and possible.

The opportunity of the Children’s Corridor is to help focus and leverage community efforts on behalf of Denver/Aurora children, to work together to produce better results for kids. The Piton Foundation will create a platform – a space and opportunity — that supports participation, collaboration, and innovation; principles that will guide the effort; and partnerships with the many organizations, institutions, businesses and individuals already hard at work in the Corridor on behalf of children.

Platform

The “platform” will help create a commonly expressed agenda, a common language, a shared sense of urgency, a shared stake in outcomes, and the tools necessary to knit independent efforts together.  It will help stimulate innovations in the health and education pipeline, and to take those innovations, as well as existing examples of excellence, to scale.

 

Currently being conceived and constructed, the platform will include:

  1.  Common goals and measures of success
  2.  Data and communications infrastructure
  3.  Collaborative infrastructure
  4.  Financial  infrastructure
  5.  Physical infrastructure
  6.  Policy infrastructure

It will reflect commitment to flexibility, learning from mistakes and missteps, and willingness to change strategy as results dictate.

Principles

  1. We will work on behalf of all children.
  2. We will support solutions that are co-created with families and children, recognizing that the best and most sustainable solutions are those that people develop for themselves.
  3. We will focus our efforts on early intervention, recognizing that prevention is a more effective strategy than remediation.
  4. We will put the interests of children and families ahead of the interests of institutions and bureaucracies.
  5. We will actively seek partners, recognizing that we are only one actor among many and can only achieve long-term success through collective and integrated efforts.
  6. We will remain flexible and creative in our approach, recognizing that conditions on the ground are in a constant state of flux.
  7. We will ensure that our investments and outcomes are evidence-based, supported by sound data and research.
  8. We will design accountability into the work so we can hold ourselves responsible for results and fairly evaluate what is and is not working.
  9. We will stop supporting strategies that don’t work.

 

Partners

The most important part of the Children’s Corridor toolkit is partnership.  Not just Piton’s direct partners, but the network of individuals and organizations already on the ground in the Corridor that achieve more, duplicate less, and encourage one another’s success through collaboration.

We will actively seek partners for our work, from different sectors, and with different expertise.

The Corridor is bringing together a growing roster of “fellow travelers” dedicated to better outcomes for children and families.   If you are living or working in the Corridor, we would like to know about your interests and efforts Click Here