The CUSP Network

With over a decade of collaboration with states, municipalities, and nonprofits to improve child and family outcomes, 3Si recognizes the power of uniting insights and solutions across states and organizations that are attempting to solve a common problem. This is why we built the CUSP Network – a pioneering community of practice made up of state and local early childhood agencies and their key partners. All states and municipalities that have implemented CUSP (3Si’s industry leading ECIDS solution) are part of the CUSP Network. This currently includes California, the City of Chicago, Georgia, Massachusetts, Washington state, and Wyoming. Additionally, there are other states that have partnered with 3Si in ECIDS planning engagements, including Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Minnesota, Utah, and Alaska, all of which have contributed learnings and insights on their most important challenges and innovative solutions around early childhood policies and programs.

Through the CUSP Network, 3Si facilitates partnerships and information-sharing across states and communities who share an interest in improving the well-being of their youngest constituents. Our engagement model of ongoing partnership and close collaboration with state and local government agencies means that all 3Si clients and partners can leverage the collective knowledge and best practices from across 3Si’s CUSP Network. The result: All network members benefit from a virtuous cycle of ongoing and expanding learnings, use cases, data applications, and new cloud technologies and tools, all of which inform 3Si’s continuous innovation and expansion of CUSP and its out-of-the-box capabilities.

When a new state joins the network, they do not start from scratch; instead, they can leverage the CUSP Software Development Kit (SDK)—a comprehensive software package that encapsulates and codifies our learnings from across the CUSP Network, our innovative analytical methodology, and our deep subject matter and technical expertise and experience. This means that every state in the CUSP Network benefits from efficient implementation, leading-edge and reliable data capabilities, and powerful, relevant analytics on an accelerated timeline. With the CUSP SDK, 3Si can quickly and efficiently deliver an ECIDS MVP, or Minimum Viable Product for states, which we can collaboratively refine, improve, and expand over time with more data and capabilities, while harnessing (and contributing to) the shared learnings, use cases, and proven analytical approaches from the CUSP Network. Here are some examples:

• Improvements to the CUSP population modeling methodology to make it more robust and rigorous, which we implemented first to meet one state’s specific needs but implemented across the network for better-quality estimates for all our clients and partners.
• The inclusion of a measure of communities’ socio-economic vulnerability as a crucial lens in the analysis of their need for early childhood services, pioneered by one state and adopted across the network.
• Nuanced, multi-dimensional analyses of child care access deserts, developed at first by 3Si to address the priority use cases of some states in the CUSP Network and deployed over time for the use and benefit of all members.
• 3Si’s ongoing development of new analytical solutions, outputs, and data visualizations driven by the information demands from early adopter clients and deployed seamlessly for all clients.
• Ongoing code enhancements to improve CUSP’s performance, efficiency, and scalability benefit the entire network.

The implementation of CUSP in states and municipalities is a vital step in improving early childhood policy and planning across the country. The CUSP Network brings together collective knowledge and experience, allowing new states to transition smoothly into the system and benefit from innovation happening nationwide. As more states join this pioneering network, we can expect to see accelerating advancements in the breadth and depth of CUSP, with the goal of making actionable data as widely available as possible to inform early childhood policy and planning.

Interested in learning more about our work? Connect with us here.