Good+Foundation is a leading national nonprofit that works to dismantle multigenerational poverty by pairing tangible goods with innovative services for low-income fathers, mothers and caregivers, creating an upward trajectory for the whole family. Founded in 2001 by Jessica Seinfeld, Good+Foundation began operations in New York City. As an organization founded and led by women, our goal was to get mothers the tools they need — such as clothing, diapers, high chairs and strollers — to provide for their children. It took most of our first decade, though, to fully recognize that our culture, policy and social service providers were treating fathers as secondary, non-essential actors in the well-being of these children. After years of pairing our donations with social services primarily providing for mothers, our fatherhood initiative started in 2010 with our first donations made to fatherhood-specific programs. We expanded our operations to Los Angeles this same year. Research has yielded strong evidence that father absence has persistent negative effects on children’s social-emotional development. Similarly, enabling a father to be involved in his child’s development can bring moderate to high cognitive function gains to the child. Through our work with grantee partners, we aim to address some of the barriers to father engagement, giving non-custodial and low-income dads better tools to become active fathers and supportive co-parents.

1. Addressing the needs of non-custodial fathers Since beginning to serve fatherhood programs in 2010, Good+Foundation has donated more than 1.3 million items — such as cribs, diapers and strollers — to more than 30,000 fathers and their families. Our incentive model pairs these items with progress through transformative services around continuing education, healthy relationships, mental health, responsible parenting, workforce training and more. We also support events fostering strengthened bonds within families, such as Shop with Pops, in which we provide The Children’s Place gift cards to fathers who have completed our grantee partners’ curriculum. These dads bring their families to the store to purchase new clothing, which reinforces to the father that he can be a provider. It also gives him valuable time with his child and builds trust with the mother. Good+ is providing for the immediate material needs of fathers while helping them gain the tools to empower themselves and their families. 2. Building capacity for existing partners to include fathers Traditional gender norms often condition men to avoid seeking the help that they need, and social services have long cemented this notion by neglecting fathers in their programming. This was especially true among our LA partners, where only 24 percent of the non-fatherhood focused programs were actually tracking father engagement in 2018, despite purporting to help families in need. After a re-application process, Good+ began facilitating webinars and quarterly partner meetings to provide ongoing professional development and collaboration around best practices and successes as we seek to better address our three focus areas: Engaging Fathers, Supporting Mothers and Early Childhood Education. By 2019, the number of LA partners tracking father engagement reached 100 percent. Good+ is also launching the Father Factor Collaborative Facebook group to bring together all parties critical to effecting systemic change around fatherhood. 3. Implementing and advocating for reform to systems marginalizing fathers Good+ has expanded professional development beyond our grantee partner network. In 2019, we began partnering with the LA County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS) to train all incoming social workers twice monthly on addressing implicit biases and engaging fathers in a positive way. We have also become active in the policy arena through our continued partnership with Ascend at the Aspen Institute to address outdated child support laws. Current legislation creates barriers within families rather than tearing them down, so Good+ and Ascend created a toolkit for comprehensive child support reform at the state level. The toolkit includes educational issue-focused white papers and provides case stories about states that have successfully reformed their laws and how they did so.

With warehouses in New York City and Los Angeles – the two largest cities in the United States and home to more than 2 million people living below the poverty line – and around 75 partners nationwide, Good+Foundation has the capacity and connections to be a national leader combating inequality and implicit bias against dads. Alan-Michael Graves, Ed.D. leads our work to create father-friendly environments, develop strategies for broader father-inclusive policy change, implement training programs and provide technical assistance and incentivized donations to help partners serve fathers more effectively. He is an established and well-respected leader in this space. Current child support policies disproportionately punish poor fathers and fathers of color by restricting access to their children and making it more difficult to work; our work aims to change that. Good+ and Ascend at the Aspen Institute have partnered to drive comprehensive child support reform at the state level with the creation of educational issue-focused white papers on topics like alternatives to civil contempt and jail, driver’s license suspension exemptions, co-parenting support and fatherhood. These papers will also draft legislation for lawmakers at the state level. A Good+ working group assembled to create a child support policy environment that promotes father engagement has identified broad consensus from national leaders for such reforms.

Good+Foundation conducts a comprehensive annual survey of all grantee partners, which requires updated demographics and presenting conditions of families served. This data helps us learn who we are reaching and how we can provide the most effective support. The information we gather also includes targeted case stories and qualitative answers on the relationship between specific products and their effect for each program. This indicates how our grantees are utilizing the incentives, and the difference they make for the families who receive them. Our most recent annual survey of our partners, completed at the start of 2020, revealed that: 1. 96 percent said that donations motivated clients to reach goals; 2. 94 percent of our partners felt that product donations motivated clients to stay in the program; 3. 92 percent said incentives motivated clients to participate in additional programs and/or services; and 4. 76 percent of our partners reported that the product donations helped recruit and enroll families in their programs. As Good+Foundation implemented a mandate requiring all partners to strategically engage fathers through their programming, we made gathering uniform baseline data a top priority, as only half of our non-fatherhood-specific partners (programs traditionally serving mothers and children) had even been tracking fathers. We asked them to complete surveys using a pair of highly-regarded tools for assessing attitudes, behaviors and programming related to father engagement in the social service sector: the “Role of the Father Questionnaire” by Dr. Rob Palkovitz of the University of Delaware and the “Engaging Fathers in Programs for Families” tool from the Best Start Resource Centre. These assessment tools ask specific questions about father-inclusive program design, training and outreach to give us information on our grantees’ investment in father engagement. We administered a follow-up assessment a year later which showed improvement in 11 father engagement practices across our partner network. Among non-fatherhood partners, 100% are working to better integrate fathers into existing programs; 92% now have resources, articles and more for staff to read and stay current on the role of fathers (a 19% increase); and 89% have assessed the father-friendliness of their environment, compared to just 73% before. Attitudes have shifted as well, as 100% of our partners now agree that it is essential for the child's well-being that fathers spend time interacting and playing with their children, and 92% agree that the way a father treats his baby in the first six months has important lifelong effects on the child, a 10% increase.

In 2018, Good+Foundation donated approximately 1.7 million items worth more than $6.2 million to 133 grantee partners in 2018. In total, Good+ met 87 percent of requests for critical children’s gear for the year and donated nearly 1.2 million diapers to program partners across the country. Since inception, Good+ has donated more than 26 million diapers. The Good+ team deepened efforts to train and build the capacity of the broader social service sector in 2019. Overall, we trained 1,459 people totaling 7,807 hours. Specific training areas included: - Father Engagement: In addition to providing ongoing training and support to our Good+ network partners, we also provided extensive training in other social service sectors, especially in child welfare. Alan-Michael Graves expanded our partnership with the LA Department of Child & Family Services (DFCS) by providing father engagement training as part of the DCFS Academy for all new social workers who will work in the field in LA. Good+ trained 1,235 new social workers about to begin their careers in child welfare to be father inclusive, totaling 7,142 hours. In both NY & LA, we provided additional fatherhood engagement training to 187 people totaling 545 hours, including nurse-home visitors in the Bronx and trainings on the role of grandparents/grandfathers as caregivers. - Mental Health/Trauma-Informed Care: In order to get at one of the root causes of the many challenges the families we serve face, we worked with Vibrant Emotional Health and other leading practitioners to provide 120 hours of training to 37 people in both NYC and LA on how to apply a trauma-informed lens to their work and their own lives. - Many of these trainings were part of all-partner convenings held in both NYC and LA to bring together our nonprofit partners to learn, share best practices and provide feedback on the changing needs of the families they serve. Our LA program team also conducted in-person site visits with all LA network partners and staff on both coasts regularly attended program events throughout the year (graduations, holiday parties, workshops) to continue to build strong relationships with our partners. Building on the success of our November 2018 “Father Factor” convening with the Aspen Institute, Good+ convened a Child Support Working Group to keep the momentum from the initial gathering moving forward. With support from the Working Group, Good+and the Aspen Institute began work on a Child Support Policy Toolkit. The toolkit will include an overview framing paper and shorter briefs on specific reforms that states can easily implement to substantially improve the child support system. Good+ also participated in 17 different conferences, convenings and high-level meetings in 2019. These thought leadership activities included Jessica Seinfeld presenting at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Alan-Michael Graves making numerous presentations across the country and Laurel Parker West presenting to an ACF convening.