A social innovation incubator and accelerator that supports the health, development, and well-being of children and families where they live, learn, work, play and pray.
90% of children’s health is influenced by the complex interplay between social, environmental, behavioral, and genetic/epigenetic factors.
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McGinnis, J.M. et al., Health Affairs, 2022
What is Social Innovation?
Creative strategies, frameworks and other resources that support the health, development, and well-being of children, families and communities.
The Lab incubates and advances social innovations by:
Co-designing solutions in partnership with children, families, and communities using human-centered design approaches and frameworks.
Strengthening family and community protective factors to support child health and wellbeing.
Advancing systems change to help children and families thrive in all areas of life.
Our Services
Let’s innovate together! Innovation is a cross-sector, collaborative effort. Explore the ways in which we can design, test, and evaluate innovations together for optimal scale or spread:
For more information on any of the services below, email childhoodprosperitylab [at] connecticutchildrens.org (childhoodprosperitylab[at]connecticutchildrens[dot]org) or complete this form.
Mastermind Sessions
Are you designing and/or implementing innovations that address social drivers of child health, development, and well-being?
Schedule a FREE 60-minute consultation and incubate your innovation with a multidisciplinary panel of experts from Connecticut Children's and receive feedback to guide the development of your innovation.
A Sample of Our Portfolio
North Hartford Ascend is a place-based initiative connecting children and families, prenatal through career, living in the North Hartford Promise Zone to the programs, services and other resources they need to reach their full potential. Childhood Prosperity Lab is a partner of Ascend, leading co-design initiatives that elevate the role of family and community voice and trains service providers affiliated with Ascend on the Strengthening Families Protective Factors Framework through a Community of Practice.
Help Me Grow is a system of support for families with young children, designed to connect them with resources and services to promote healthy development. It's not a single program, but a network of community services that address child health, behavior, development, and learning. Childhood Prosperity Lab has a long-standing partnership with the Help Me Grow National Center, helping them to diffuse and disseminate innovations across the network of 130+ affiliates.
Building for Health strengthens communication and coordination among a range of programs, services, and other resources that aim to enhance the livability of homes, including but not limited to home hazard mitigation, energy efficiency, home upgrades, utility and housing financial assistance, legal assistance for housing matters, and asthma prevention so that residents thrive in homes that are livable and promote well-being. In 2023, Childhood Prosperity Lab partnered with Healthy Homes, another program of the Office for Community Child Health, to lead a set of co-design sessions and stakeholder interviews to inform the development of an innovation model, inclusive of a theory of change and logic model.
Check out blogs written by the Lab!
From social innovation to co-design and healthy child development, our team’s blogs explore the ideas shaping brighter futures for children and so much more.
Jacquelyn M. Rose, MPH, serves as Director of Childhood Prosperity Lab and Deputy Director of the North Hartford Ascend Pipeline in Connecticut Children’s Office for Community Child Health. She supports Childhood Prosperity Lab by building relationships with changemakers and providing technical assistance and other support to advance their innovations. Jacquelyn is also responsible for leading and executing strategic planning and implementation of the North Hartford Ascend Pipeline, a place-based initiative that integrates achievement-oriented schools with vital, evidence-based community-oriented services and programs to support the health, development, well-being, and academic achievement and attainment of children living in the North Hartford Promise Zone. Prior to joining Connecticut Children’s, Jacquelyn served as Director of Outreach and Community Programs for the police department in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she was responsible for planning, implementing, and evaluating community-oriented programs and initiatives. Jacquelyn holds a master’s degree in public health from Boston University and a bachelor’s degree in public health from Southern Connecticut State University. Jacquelyn is a certified Human-Centered Design Practitioner and Strengthening Families Protective Factors Framework Trainer.
Annika Anderson, MPH, is a Childhood Prosperity Lab Program Specialist in Connecticut Children’s Office for Community and Child Health. Annika is a certified Human-centered Design Practitioner, Parent Cafe Host, and Strengthening Families Protective Factors Framework Trainer. In her role at Connecticut Children’s, she leverages her content area expertise to engage her colleagues, internal and external, in regular capacity building activities to share best practices in parent/caregiver engagement. As a Lab Coordinator, Annika also supports the advancement of social innovations that foster the healthy development of children and families. Prior to joining Connecticut Children’s, Annika was an early learning engagement intern at PBS KIDS and a consultant for the International Rescue Committee’s New York office, where she contributed to the development of early learning and family-facing educational resources. Annika holds a masters of public health sciences and a bachelor’s degree in human development & family sciences with a specialization in early childhood from the University of Connecticut.
Changemakers
Are you an individual, non-profit/for-profit organization, or public entity that wants to develop and/or implement innovations that address social determinants of child health, development, and well-being?
The Lab can inform the development of your innovation so that it reaches desired level of impact through:
The Mastermind is a 60-90 minute consultation where changemakers meet with a multidisciplinary panel of experts from Connecticut Children’s and receive feedback to guide the development of an innovation.
After the Mastermind, consider engaging with the Lab to strengthen the design, testing, implementation, and evaluation of your innovation so that it has the potential to reach local, regional, statewide, and/or national impact. We will co-create a deliverable-based scope of work that ensures prioritization of your goals.
Strengthen your knowledge of child health, development, and well-being so that your innovation is informed by the latest best practices and science. The Lab currently offers training in the Strengthening Families Protective Factors Framework and strategies to engage children, families, and communities using human-centered design approaches.
The Lab values a systems-oriented approach to work. We partner with changemakers who serve and/or work on behalf of children and families to explore opportunities to fund, implement, communicate, scale, and spread innovations.
Are you part of a group of individuals or organizations who want to identify, advance, and spread social innovations?
The Lab can elevate your Networks’ expertise and scale your impact through:
Helping to identify the best strategies and frameworks that would scale existing innovations within your system.
Facilitating activities where multidisciplinary professionals from across sectors collaborate to pilot test, assess the impact, support, and/or diffuse innovations. Some of our services include:
The Lab can facilitate the growth of promising and efficacious innovations shown to strengthen implementation and/or the evaluation of your model. Read about how the Lab facilitated a community of practice in the Help Me Grow network!
The Lab can facilitate a shared learning experience in which individuals from your network, content area experts, and other partners external assess how integrating a novel strategy into your model impacts implementation and impact. All parties contribute their knowledge, expertise, experiences, and a growth mindset to the Learning Community and receive knowledge, skills, and experiences in return.
The Lab can help you explore opportunities to improve, refine, or strengthen implementation, evaluation, and impact of your model with stakeholders from your network.
Affiliates in your network can participate in a Mastermind session to receive feedback on an innovation from a multi-disciplinary panel of experts at Connecticut Children’s.
The Lab introduces innovations that are addressing child and family health to networks that are positioned to implement them.
Read about the Networks we have partnered with!
The North Hartford Ascend Pipeline is a cradle to career effort to ensure children living in the North Hartford Promise Zone – which includes the Clay Arsenal, Northeast, and Upper Albany neighborhoods – have the supports they need to reach their full potential. Overseen by Connecticut Children’s, Ascend partners are working to create a comprehensive and integrated network of programs and services that will be universally available to children and families in the North Hartford Promise Zone. The Lab will support Ascend by supporting the development of, pilot testing, and scaling social innovations that are identified as a priority in this community.
Childhood Prosperity Lab has a longstanding relationship with the Help Me Grow National Center that has focused on cultivating, testing, and scaling innovations that strengthen implementation and evaluation of the system model. Together, we have:
Facilitated a national innovation challenge designed to identify, advance, and increase the visibility and impact of innovative systems enhancements.
Scaled two innovative system enhancements to 18 communities across the country through communities of practice.
Lead two national work groups to explore 1) how implementation and impact of the Centralized Access Point can be strengthen and 2) develop a framework to integrate goal concordance into the Help Me Grow System Model.
Facilitated a learning community composed of 12 communities from around the county to understand the impact of eliciting goals for their child into the Help Me Grow System Model.
In 2022, the Help Me Grow National Center launched a nationwide learning community to study the impact of expanding a focus on parent-identified goals through the Help Me Grow system model in an effort to advance family engagement, family satisfaction, and achievement of parent/caregiver goals for child health and development. To support implementation at 12 Help Me Grow affiliate systems nationwide, capacity building partners with expertise in motivational interviewing, the parent cafe model, protective factors and the HOPE framework are guiding the ways in which these strategies can lead to goal identification, monitoring and strength-based communication. Childhood Prosperity Lab is positioned to leverage key learnings of the study and explore the necessary inputs and conditions to disseminate promising practices across the Help Me Grow national affiliate network.
In 2019, Healthy Homes, a program in Connecticut Children’s Office for Community Child Health, joined a three-year initiative led by Local Initiatives Support Corporation-Connecticut (LISC-CT) to launch an innovative, place-based, “no wrong door” system-level approach to enhancing health and life outcomes for children. The Building for Health (BfH) initiative initially supported Hartford residents and homeowners and later expanded statewide. BfH includes an integrated “One Touch” survey to identify resident priorities and link homeowners and families to services addressing those priorities. Childhood Prosperity Lab has joined this collective effort, leading the development of an innovation model that is systems-oriented, community informed, and focused on sustainable implementation.
