Commonwealth, an Annie E. Casey Foundation grantee, recently launched an incentive program to help Americans build savings through a program called Prize Savings. Prize Savings allows Walmart MoneyCard customers to enter monthly sweepstakes that awards cash prizes when the customers elect to save. This proven strategy that motivates positive financial behaviors can help families build savings and assets.

This report from the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University focuses on “core capabilities,” including executive function, and how they can be impacted by toxic stress, leading to challenges with life skills such as parenting and workplace effectiveness. The report discusses how environmental triggers can impact ability to use core capabilities to maintain emotional balance, and reviews how and when these skills develop. The report also includes examples of how excessive stress can alter one’s ability to use core capabilities, and how service providers can help clients build missing capabilities.

This 2012 training module from the Washington State Department of Early Learning provides an overview of executive functioning skills, what they are, how they affect children and provides tips to child care workers.

The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) created this guide for writing easy-to-read materials for audiences who have trouble reading or understanding information. The guide offers tips on how to understand your audience, how to write clearly and format materials cleanly, and how to evaluate your materials for readability.

Washington state was among an initial cohort of Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child innovation clusters, a network of pilot sites within the state that links human service programs with university-based researchers to address issues of toxic stress, executive function and early learning.

The Frontiers of Innovation initiative from Harvard University’s Center on the Developing Child released a short video about a theory of change to achieve breakthrough outcomes for vulnerable children and families. The video depicts the need to focus on building capabilities of caregivers, as well as strengthen communities that form the environment of crucial relationships for children’s lifelong development.

The Office of Family Assistance (OFA) hosted a webinar entitled Integrating Executive Functioning Principles, Soft Skills Activities, and Case Management Coaching in order to Improve Economic Success for TANF Recipients. This Webinar provided resources and step-by-step recommendations to help participants better integrate case management approaches based on the work of the Crittenton Women's Union, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities- Building Better Programs initiative and the Minnesota's Ramsey County activities. The overarching goals of the Webinar were to: 1. Provide an overview of executive functioning, the emergence of brain science research within the human services and the intersection of executive functioning and soft skills as a means to improve social and economic development from the Building Better Program's initiative developed by the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities; 2. Provide integration insights from the Crittenton Women's Union approach to improving executive functioning and economic mobility among TANF recipients and low-skilled individuals; and 3. Share lessons learned and implementation strategies from Ramsey County, Minnesota which has been rigorously evaluated and has been shown to improve economic outcomes for clients.

This video and companion brief from Harvard University's Center on the Developing Child provide an overview of what executive function is and how it affects one’s life-long capacity to learn. It explains how these skills develop, what can disrupt their development, and how supporting them can pay off in school, work and life.

This paper, from the Crittenton Women’s Union (CWU), discusses how executive functioning skills are important to move out of poverty. Executive functioning includes skills like impulse control, working memory, and mental flexibility. Persistent poverty can influence brain development and executive functioning and provide challenges for individuals as adults. The paper reviews how improving executive functioning can help promote positive outcomes and discusses how policy and programs can be developed to improve executive functioning.