When Governor Wes Moore took office in 2023, 11 percent of all children living in Maryland—including more than 1 in 4 in some counties—were living in poverty. Since day one, Governor Moore’s administration has made it its mission to tackle child poverty through a “whole government approach,” as he described at a recent Urban Institute event.

The state has formed a cross-agency Children’s Cabinet to coordinate these antipoverty efforts, raised the minimum wage, expanded eligibility for tax credits, developed a tool to promote uptake of public benefits, funded food assistance efforts, and removed barriers to affordable housing development. But perhaps the most ambitious and comprehensive strategy has been the ENOUGH initiative, a place-based, community-driven antipoverty grant program that targets communities with high rates of child poverty across the state.

Today, Maryland residents—and people all over the country—are facing cuts to food assistance, public education, and Medicaid; attempts to cut housing assistance and child care; rising prices from tariffs; and the fallout of mass layoffs across federal agencies (from which Maryland suffered the highest federal job losses of any state). In this environment of dwindling federal funding, Maryland and other states have a larger role to play in addressing their residents’ needs.

The Engaging Neighborhoods, Organizations, Unions, Governments, and Households (ENOUGH) initiative is a promising example for how other states can work across silos, enact evidence-based policies, and partner with local communities to reduce child poverty. Here’s how Maryland built ENOUGH from the ground up and similar steps states can take to improve children’s lives.

The ENOUGH Initiative prioritizes community-driven strategies and robust measurement to ensure results and accountability

ENOUGH, which draws inspiration from the Harlem Children’s Zone, StriveTogether, Purpose Built Communities, and Partners for Rural Impact, brings together often siloed efforts and programs at the community, local, and state levels in support of community-driven solutions designed to improve access to good schools, good jobs, and safe and healthy communities. Grantee communities include urban, suburban, and rural places, most of which are five square miles or fewer.

In 2024, ENOUGH funded 24 communities with planning grants ($65,000 for new partnership development or $300,000 for plan development) and three well-established collaboratives with $3 million implementation grants. In December 2025, the Governor’s Office for Children announced the next round of funding. The three implementation communities received awards for the second year, and six of the planning communities received implementation awards for year two. Communities collect program data and use other local metrics from the state to guide their decisions and track their progress toward reducing poverty. The Governor’s Office for Children, which runs the program, provides technical assistance to help grantees align their strategies and measurement.

ENOUGH is organized around three pillars: children (high-quality child care and education), families (healthy and economically secure), and communities (safe and thriving). Grantees must identify how their activities will improve outcomes in each of these areas. The state collaborated with The Urban Institute, Baltimore’s Promise, and Clear Impact to adopt the Results-Based Accountability (PDF) framework with grantees to connect their program-level progress to higher-level population results. ENOUGH grantees are applying the Results-Based Accountability framework to take the following steps:

• Prioritize outcomes. ENOUGH grantees selected population-level outcome indicators for each pillar from a data bank developed with Urban Institute support. The bank offers evidence on the indicator’s connection to poverty and leverages neighborhood- or county-level data from federal sources and several state administrative data systems.
• Define and track local progress. Under the Results-Based Accountability framework, grantees work with their partners to define and report on measures related to their strategies, including the quantity and quality of services delivered and the direct effects on participants. This framework enables grantees to be clear about what their programs will do, who they will serve, and which short- and medium-term results are expected—so they can track and modify implementation as needed.
• Define and track state progress. The State of Maryland is committed to tracking its own performance on state programs and processes that are supporting conditions for ENOUGH grantees to achieve outcomes. To support Maryland with program eligibility and participation, the Urban Institute leveraged its microsimulation models to produce eligibility estimates for key safety net programs such as Medicaid, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children. These substate estimates help indicate what share of residents might be eligible in each community. Maryland can use these findings to quantify the potential impact of outreach or policy changes aimed at expanding coverage or benefits in targeted areas, prioritize resources where they will affect the largest eligible populations, and forecast fiscal and service needs.

Together, these elements provide a solid foundation for ENOUGH’s measurement framework designed to drive results, which Maryland leaders will continue to refine with grantee feedback. Though it will take time to change poverty rates in these communities, the first set of narrative reports and performance and outcome metrics that grantees submitted in July provide early insights into how grantees across all three types of grants were building capacity, engaging residents, implementing strategies, and monitoring performance aligned with the ENOUGH initiative’s goals. Implementation grantees reported disbursing cash or housing assistance to hundreds of families and hosting well-attended early childhood initiatives and out-of-school-time programs. Local teams were in the process of measuring outcomes for community members.

Recent economic shocks could increase residents’ needs and make it harder to measure the benefits of state or local programs like ENOUGH on a population level. Even when the metrics are in place, interpreting them will require care in assessing what improved because of local actions amid negative trends driven by federal policy or macroeconomic shocks. For example, under these circumstances, an unchanged level of child poverty might actually indicate a success if other comparable places without ENOUGH programming see an increase in poverty. This interpretation in context is important to help communities determine whether to scale, alter, or abandon an approach.

The GOC and Children’s Cabinet are also working to break down silos and facilitate the connection between state government and communities through an all-of-government approach. This includes strategically piloting and prioritizing ENOUGH communities in the cabinet’s work. For example, the cabinet has launched a Community Schools Delivery Program that matches participating state agencies directly with Community Schools across the state of Maryland to help provide wraparound services to students and their families. Through this all-of-government approach, the Children’s Cabinet has helped direct additional state government funding beyond the ENOUGH grant program to ENOUGH communities.

What states can learn from ENOUGH’s approach to measuring progress

If policymakers in other states want to replicate Maryland’s approach to implementing and measuring the ENOUGH program amid the uncertain and evolving federal landscape, they can consider the state’s multipronged strategies:

• Invest in state data systems and administrative linkages. When federal datasets are unreliable or insufficient, state health, education, tax, housing, and justice systems can provide timely indicators. Standardized measures allow grantees to report comparable results without overwhelming local groups.
• Pair population indicators with participant‑level measurement. Results-Based Accountability and program metrics help show short‑term wins that precede population shifts and tailor strategies to local challenges and priorities.
• Provide technical assistance and incorporate grantee feedback. Supporting local communities both to develop the local data tools and capacities and to provide input on the tools they will be using is critical for this model to work.
• Use narrative reporting to contextualize quantitative trends. Local voices explain implementation realities and help evaluators attribute effects.

Maryland’s ENOUGH initiative and whole‑government approach demonstrate how a state can take the lead when federal support is retreating. By pairing robust state data systems with grantee‑level measurement, the state is building measurable pathways to reduce child poverty. Continued investment, regular grantee feedback, and data infrastructure will be essential to scale and sustain these promising efforts.