Friday, May 9, 2025
5/9/2025
Breakthrough Accelerator: Scaling Innovations Through Equity-Centered Design - Child Trends, in partnership Power to Decide, propose to host an accelerator innovation hub – the Breakthrough Accelerator. Our vision is a world in which all adolescent sexual and reproductive health (ASRH) programs, products, and services are informed by adolescents’ lived experience and contexts, co-designed with the adolescents who will use them, implemented with an equity focus, and positively impact adolescents. Our mission is to build the capacity of Innovation Design Teams (IDTs) to use equity-focused practices to test, refine, evaluate, and scale innovations that consider the root causes of health inequities, thereby filling critical program gaps and advancing ASRH equity. The Breakthrough Accelerator will have two tracks - commercialization and evaluation. The commercialization track is appropriate for IDTs that want to establish their innovation as a best practice. They may want to take their innovation to market for the first time, be interested in dissemination and scaling, or be seeking support to build a sustainable operational structure to support their innovation over time. The evaluation track is appropriate for IDTs that want to move toward conducting a rigorous evaluation with the goal of becoming evidence based. Our vision of hub success is aligned with our understanding of equity and innovation as processes and outcomes. To this end, we aim to track and measure the movement of six to eight IDTs per cohort through the innovation continuum, as well as the extent to which IDTs ultimately feel a sense of agency in their work – in their ability to take their innovation to market or scale or to rigorously evaluate it, and to incorporate equitable practices. This view of success as iterative and dynamic and will require a holistic, creative, and multi-method approach to measurement. We expect evaluation and learning to be critical features of the project and we will use both quantitative and qualitative methods to meaningfully explore our performance and progress. In addition to capacity-building and evaluation support provided to IDTs, we will develop and implement an ambitious learning agenda to ensure that we consistently examine, improve, and amplify the innovations and learnings of our hub. This agenda will serve as a critical guidepost for our project design, implementation, evaluation, and dissemination activities. Informed by liberatory design, our agenda will center the core question underpinning our hub’s theoretical approach: “How can innovation serve as a force for equity in ASRH and address the historical and current inequities?” We aim to not only improve hub processes, but also inform and push forward innovation within the ASRH field. Dissemination will be an ongoing and essential project component. We will target diverse audiences, from practitioners, to researchers, to current or potential IDTs, to innovation end users and other youth. Importantly, we will treat dissemination as a collaborative and bi-directional process and recognize IDTs as key partners in success. Throughout, we will center lived experience, being sure to build in opportunities for IDT members and youth to guide our team’s efforts. Our proposed project team is well-equipped to implement the Breakthrough Accelerator. Child Trends and Power to Decide have a history of working together, and with OPA, to advance ASRH. Combined, we consist of 15 staff highly skilled in innovation, capacity building assistance, and evaluation, with expertise in ASRH, teen pregnancy prevention, human centered design, and youth participatory action research. Our combined experience demonstrates our unique ability to identify IDTs likely to be successful in advancing their innovation along the continuum and to build their capacity to do so (through evaluation or scaling), centering equity every step of the way.
HHS’ Tracking Accountability in Government Grants System (TAGGS) website provides access to detailed descriptions of grants, loans, aggregated direct payments and other types of financial assistance awarded by the HHS Operating Divisions (OPDIVs) and the Office of the Secretary Staff Divisions (STAFFDIVs).