Cities and counties from across the nation are pioneering new clean energy solutions that could help end our nation’s oil addiction and create good jobs, according to the most recent report from the Apollo Alliance. Four Ohio municipalities: Bowling Green, Canton, Cincinnati, Cleveland, are highlighted in the national report. Policy Matters Ohio, Apollo’s Ohio partner, is thrilled that New Energy for Cities highlights dozens of representative municipal programs that promote renewable power, reduce oil consumption, make buildings more efficient and promote smart growth. The mission of Ohio Apollo is to work with Ohio’s cities to adopt these policies and create jobs through environmentally sound and energy efficient solutions.

By implementing a demand-driven model in mid-2010, Employment Connection, the workforce-training agency for Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, has greatly improved the services it provides to local firms and workers.

Almost everyone believes that afterschool programs are one of those good things for youngsters. And yet many kids are left out: Only 15 percent - 8.4 million - of the country's school children participate, according to a report, "America After 3 PM," by the advocacy organization Afterschool Alliance. That leaves millions more students returning to empty houses, or worse. At a Feb. 21-22, 2013, conference in Baltimore, close to 400 people invited from 57 U.S. cities gathered to discuss what they could do to push for better afterschool programs - and make sure that programming is available to all the kids who need it.

School District Resolution adopting Berkeley's 2020 Vision plan to provide all Berkeley children with equitable education outcomes regardless of race, ethnicity, or income by 2020.

The bipartisan research team of Public Opinion Strategies and Hart Research recently completed a survey of 800 voters throughout the United States. It revealed overwhelming support for ensuring that children gain the knowledge and skills necessary to start kindergarten off on the right foot, with a majority of voters saying that we should do more to achieve this goal. When presented with the broad outlines of a federal plan that helps states provide better early childhood education programs to low- and middle-income families without increasing the debt, fully seven-in-ten voice their support-with strong majorities of support among Republicans (60%), Independents (64%) and Democrats (84%).

Today more than ever, businesses need employees who are well prepared to succeed in a competitive economy. But the current workforce pipeline is not sufficient - not for businesses that need highly-skilled staff, not for young people who need good paying jobs, and not for the nation that needs a growing economy. When processes fail, business leaders do not look for solutions after the fact - they look upstream to prevent them from happening in the first place. The foundation for success starts in the earliest years of children's lives, when they begin to develop the knowledge, skills, and behaviors they need to do well in school and beyond. To fix our failing workforce pipeline, we need to help our children get the good start in life that will enable them to succeed.

Early child development and education programming have proven to be effective investments in both young children and the communities in which they live. An international body of research points to strong evidence that high-quality early child development and early education policies, with appropriate standards and accountability, yield many more benefits than costs through the use of finite community resource dollars. Not only do young children acquire important social-emotional skills that yield long term benefits to both society and individual families, but the early years are the greatest opportunity to develop cognitive skills for optimal brain development, healthy habits, and lay a foundation for years of future academic success. Employers also capture short and long-term benefits for their local firms when early care and education is supported. Yet many communities, including Nashville-Davidson County have not made concentrated, comprehensive efforts to support robust and aligned early care and education efforts to ensure the sustained healthy development and success of their youngest citizens.

Designed to promote savings and economic mobility, Children's Savings Accounts (CSAs) are universal, longterm, asset-building accounts established for children with public seed money and that grow over time with additional deposits and earnings. San Francisco's Kindergarten to College (K2C) initiative opens a CSA for all children entering kindergarten in the City's public schools, putting San Francisco at the forefront of efforts to model how a national CSA policy could be implemented in the United States.

Based on a review of the most advanced city efforts to align education for young children from birth through third grade, the National League of Cities (NLC) Institute for Youth, Education and Families (YEF Institute) identified 10 common elements of effective systems alignment. This report contains case studies of local efforts in Boston, Hartford, San Antonio, San Jose and Seattle that provide examples of how cities are incorporating each of the following elements into their alignment strategies.

The Collaboration for Early Childhood is a model public/private partnership that leverages the resources of more than 40 local agencies to create a community-wide system of high-quality programs and services that foster physical, cognitive and social-emotional development during the critical first five years of life.