New Tower parking garage opens January 12. Enter via 282 Washington St; old entrance closes. Self-park and valet options available. Emergency visits: use the ED entrance and Zwieback St. garage.
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.
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.
After the Mastermind, consider partnering with the Lab to co-create a scope of work that aligns your goals for optimal impact with concrete deliverables.
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.
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.
Madhura Sawant-Suryawanshi is an Innovation Specialist with Connecticut Children’s Office of Community and Child Health, where she supports Childhood Prosperity Lab in advancing social innovations that strengthen child and family well-being. She also supports North Hartford Ascend's data and evaluation workgroup and family navigation & system’s building work group to enhance wraparound supports for children and families.
With a background in education and sociology, Madhura brings expertise in facilitating capacity-building training, developing child-focused educational programs, participatory action research, data-driven evaluation, and collaborative community engagement. She has designed and implemented STEM and early childhood programs, conducted international partnership audits, and worked as a research assistant on a project at Harvard University’s Center for Education Policy Research. Her work spans global and local contexts, from evaluating nutrition interventions in Zambia to developing inclusive teaching practices in India. She has presented her work on chronic absenteeism, discrimination, and affirmative action in international conferences. She is passionate about co-designing solutions with communities, breaking down silos, and fostering systems change to ensure all children have the opportunity to thrive.
Madhura holds a Master’s in Education Policy and Analysis from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She is also certified in Human-Centered Design and the Strengthening Families Protective Factors Framework.
Adriana Sowell serves as an Innovation Specialist for Childhood Prosperity Lab and North Hartford Ascend in Connecticut Children’s Office of Community Child Health. In her role for Ascend, she is embedded in both the Partner Engagement and Community Family Engagement Workgroups, where she enables community co-production, enhances cross-collaboration between workgroups, and helps advance social innovations that derive from workgroups. She is also a certified Human-centered Design Practitioner and Strengthening Families Protective Factors Framework Trainer, which she leverages to advance the healthy development of children and families. Before joining Connecticut Children’s, Adriana worked as a Clinical Research Assistant 1 in the FARR Lab at UConn Health where she worked on two studies Adaptation and Resilience in Childhood Study (ARCS) and Parenting Infants in the Pandemic Study (PIPS) and lead her own NICHD-funded sub study H.E.A.R.S investigating how exposure to various stressors impact the psychosocial and emotional development of young children and their mothers. Adriana holds a bachelor's in Sociomedical Sciences from the University of Connecticut.
