Frequently asked questions

Best Starts for Kids (Best Starts) is King County’s community-driven initiative to support every baby born and child raised in King County to be happy, healthy, safe, and thriving. Initially approved by voters in 2015 and in place since 2016, Best Starts invests in comprehensive supports for children, young people, families, and caregivers, catalyzing strong starts in early childhood, and sustaining those gains as children progress to adulthood.

Best Starts was renewed by voters in August 2021 and our implementation for the renewed levy (2022-2027) is guided by the Best Starts for Kids Implementation Plan, approved by the King County Council in November 2021.

Learn more about Best Starts for Kids here.

Best Starts for Kids 2.0 (2022-2027) will maintain current investments in promotion, prevention, and early intervention, and deepen investments to address critical need in our communities. We are maintaining programs across four investment areas:

• Investing Early: Programs for pregnant and parenting families and children prenatal to age five

• Sustain the Gain: Programs for children and young people age five to 24

• Communities of Opportunity (COO)

• Youth and Family Homelessness Prevention Initiative (YFHPI)

The levy also builds upon what we are doing to deepen investments in school age children and young people, including:

• New child care investments:

• A new child care subsidy program to make child care more affordable for more than 3,000 low-income families

• A new workforce demonstration project for low-wage child care workers

• Expansion of expanded learning programs for school-age children

• Open up to four new school-based health centers that provide social, emotional, mental and physical health supports for young people

• Expansion of transitions to adulthood programs for young people

View the Best Starts for Kids Implementation Plan: 2022 – 2027.

Our approach is grounded in promotion, prevention, intervening early and policy and systems change.

By promoting positive outcomes for children, intervening early when kids and families need support, and building on family and community strengths, Best Starts launches King County’s young people on a path to lifelong health and well-being. Since 2016, the initiative has pursued three overarching results:

1. Babies are born healthy and given a foundation for a happy, healthy life.

1. Young people have equitable opportunities to be safe, healthy, and thriving.

1. Communities offer safe, welcoming environments for their kids.

See how Best Starts partners are impacting the community. View our data dashboards to learn more.

The best way to keep up with Best Starts news and events is to subscribe to our blog and newsletter and follow us on social media:

• Subscribe to our blog here
  

• Subscribe to our newsletter on the right side of this webpage here to receive new funding opportunity notices and our monthly community newsletter

• Follow us on Twitter (@BestStartsKC), Facebook (@Best Starts for Kids), and YouTube (@Best Starts for Kids)

The best way to hear about upcoming funding opportunities is to subscribe to our blog and newsletter:

• Subscribe to our blog here
  

• Subscribe to our newsletter on this webpage to receive new funding opportunity notices and our monthly community newsletter

Each RFP will have explicit funding levels and funding available. Please carefully read each RFP – some will be considered "mini grants" (under $10k), and some will have larger amounts awarded. In general, Best Starts awards multi-year contracts. See what funding opportunities are open, upcoming, and closed here.

Yes! For-profit organizations can apply unless it specifically states in the RFP that they are not eligible.

All applicants applying to a Best Starts funding opportunity will be evaluated according to the scoring criteria included in the RFP. Please read the scoring criteria in each RFP carefully to understand what the reviewers will be reading for in the proposals.

In general, Best Starts for Kids funding opportunities will be competitively bid through a process that requests organizations to submit a proposal of work. This could be called a RFP (request for proposal), a RFQ (request for qualifications), a RFA (request for applications) or generically as an RFx.

Best Starts is partnering with intermediary organizations to disburse funding for two strategies — ParentChild+ and Expanded Learning — and one investment area — Communities of Opportunity (COO). We partner closely with the intermediary organizations to ensure that equity and racial justice grounds our collective work and develop the funding strategy and distribution of funds.

Free application support, known as technical assistance (TA), is available for organizations interested in applying for Best Starts funding opportunities! A TA consultant can support you as you prepare your application. Here are some of the ways they can support:

• Helping to determine appropriate fit between your work and the open funding opportunity

• Providing guidance on how best to answer application questions

• Supporting your application development -- including editing and reviewing

• Helping to explain your qualifications in the most clear and concise way

• Partnering with you to find data to make your case for funding

• Navigating the submission process (such as using ZoomGrants or Eprocurement)

If you are interested in partnering with a technical assistance consultant, learn more here.

There are three ways to ask questions about an open RFP:

1. Attend an information session to ask your question during the virtual event. Check the RFP details to find the info session details.

1. Directly email the RFP Lead – you can find their contact information on the funding opportunity’s ZoomGrants page.

1. Submit your question through ZoomGrants.

All questions and answers asked will be posted in the Q&A section on Zoomgrants for all to access.

Yes. Best Starts strives to release our RFPs in a timely, staggered manner so that organizations are not overwhelmed with applying to multiple funding opportunities all at once. Receiving an award in one area of work does not exclude you from eligibility in another area.

In general, Best Starts will fund both existing and new programs. Please read the specifics of each RFP carefully.

Best Starts values the use of multiple sources of data and information. While the use of data resources is not required, we have compiled some King County data resources to assure equal access to information. Indicators identified for Best Starts, including data on many issues related to children, young people, and families with breakdowns for geographic and racial/ethnic communities, can be found here.

You can also find more data about King County on the Communities Count website.

Once partners are selected and contracts have been developed, Best Starts program managers and evaluation team members collaborate with partners to decide on performance measures and create a performance measurement plan appropriate for their funded activities and time frame. Some strategies may continue using existing measures that their partners have already reported in previous years, while others will have opportunities to develop new measures. You can see examples of performance measures for each strategy here.

There will be Best Starts evaluation staff present at each information session (also sometimes called bidders’ conferences) to share information and answer questions. You can also submit questions to the point of contact listed in the RFP you are responding to, or contact a technical assistance provider.

We ask that applicants think about how to dedicate up to 10% of your budget towards staff time or costs needed for performance measurement, reporting, and evaluation activities. We want to partner to collect useful data and understand what it means, and we know this takes time and resources. For example: developing the performance measure plan in collaboration with King County, entering needed data, reporting progress quarterly, and potentially participating in peer learning and continuous quality improvement activities. If applicants feel that software for data collection is essential to meeting their goals, they may include this in the budget. However, there is no expectation for partners to purchase a data/case management system to help with reporting unless otherwise specified in the RFP.

Yes. After funding decisions are made, capacity building supports are available if needed. This could take the form of one-on-one support from a member of our evaluation team, participation in regular peer learning with other partners and King County staff, and/or support from a Best Starts-funded capacity building consultant, at no cost to partners. We are committed to working with partners to build capacity to collect performance measurement data and to use data for program quality improvement.

In general, Best Starts welcomes applications from individual organizations as well as collaborations among multiple partners. Neither type will be given preference except where specified in the RFP. Please read the RFP carefully to learn about its specific details.

Joint applicants can demonstrate their partnership by clearly describing the work they have done together, what work they plan to do together, and/or the roles each one will take in their proposed work. We encourage you to demonstrate this in the proposed budget and clearly lay out where and how the funding will be distributed. Letters of support are welcome and may be required if partnering with school districts. Please read the RFP details carefully to learn about its specific details.

No evaluation plan is required for the proposal. The Best Starts for Kids Data and Evaluation team and program staff will work with grantees after funding decisions are made to develop an evaluation plan.

All documents to be submitted in response to an RFP should be uploaded through the application platform, ZoomGrants.

We encourage you to double check the application deadline and submit your application through ZoomGrants early! If you are experiencing any technical difficulties, please reach out to ZoomGrants as noted on each RFP early in the process. If the issue cannot be addressed through ZoomGrants, then reach out to the RFP lead. 
 
To ensure that applicants are equally evaluated, we cannot accept any applications submitted past the application deadline.

Best Starts seeks diverse perspectives for its RFP review panels, including community leaders, parents, and young people. We recognize the importance of bringing to the decision-making process the unique insights and lived experiences of people who come from and work in their communities, especially people of color. Best Starts is requiring all review panelists, including King County staff and Best Starts Children and Youth Advisory Board members, to participate in a launch meeting to learn and discuss how bias, assumptions, and equity issues can affect how candidates are evaluated in order to consciously strive to minimize biases and assumptions throughout the decision-making process.

Best Starts views its relationship with awardees as an ongoing partnership characterized by respect and mutual learning. Best Starts staff meet with awarded organizations to build relationships and agree upon budget details, data gathering, performance measures and evaluation, all the while identifying capacity building needs so that Best Starts can support the organization to accomplish its work.

Capacity builders are consultants funded by Best Starts who offer individualized, responsive coaching and training to Best Starts partners! Best Starts matches organizations with capacity builders according to their needs - this relational approach provides one-on-one support for our partners.

Areas of support include financial management, human resources, data and evaluation, IT, marketing, board governance, equity and social justice, legal services, needs assessments, and organizational development.

If you are currently funded by Best Starts for Kids and interested in partnering with a capacity builder, please contact the Best Starts for Kids program manager for your strategy or complete this request form. For organizations interested in applying for funding opportunities, technical assistance is available to help navigate the process.

No. Funded partners will not be held accountable for changing indicators for the entire population in King County. However, a partner may be held accountable for meeting standards among the population they are directly serving.

Best Starts for Kids is committed to evaluating all of our strategies and programs to ensure that we are moving toward our vision of happy, healthy, safe, and thriving youth and families. Results Based Accountability (RBA) is fundamental to Best Starts. RBA is a plain-language framework that starts with the vision we are trying to achieve and works backward toward the strategies for getting there. The framework tracks the performance of Best Starts strategies, so that we know what is working and what may need adapting, through three types of performance measures.

1. How much did we do?
2. How well did we do it?
3. Is anyone better off?

Best Starts works together with all funded partners to identify performance measures (find data here). Our evaluation process also includes monitoring population level change (find data here) and conducting in-depth evaluation to deepen learning in some program areas, which you can learn about here. Best Starts for Kids’ evaluation approach centers equity throughout the process.

You can find performance measurement data from all Best Starts strategies in our dashboards.