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Our empirical understanding of the development of children residing in our country’s inner cities is growing. What is emerging is a grim picture of the level and extent of risk faced by these children and their families. At the same time, there is evidence of strong family functioning that helps mitigate these risks. In addition, it appears that family functioning can be aided by neighborhood networks and growing opportunities and resources to manage normal child development. As we have noted, there are many opportunities for building resilience by building family strengths in these high-risk communities. However, few have explored the potential of these avenues and even fewer have conducted empirical tests of their impact.

The hallmark of the Better Beginnings, Better Futures Project is the successful establishment of eight locally operated, community-based organizations. Faced with an extremely broad and complex mandate, high expectations, and relatively little explicit direction, each of the communities developed an organization characterized by significant and meaningful local resident involvement in all decisions. This alone represents a tremendous accomplishment in neighborhoods where 15 years ago, many local residents viewed government programs and social services with skepticism, suspicion, or hostility. In developing their local organizations, Better Beginnings projects have not only actively involved many local residents, but also played a major role in forming meaningful partnerships with other service organizations. They have developed a wide range of programs, many designed to respond to the locally identified needs of young children and their families, and others to the needs of the neighborhood and broader community. As they strengthened and stabilized over the 7-year demonstration period from 1991 to 1998, each Better Beginnings project increasingly gained the respect and support not only of local residents, service-providers, and community leaders, but also of the Provincial Government which, in 1997, transferred all projects from demonstration to annualized funding, thus recognizing them as sustainable . The short-term findings from these projects reported in this chapter are encouraging, and provide a unique foundation for determining the extent to which a universal, comprehensive, community-based strategy can promote the longer-term resilience of young children, their families and their local neighborhoods.