Founder & CEO, Children’s Funding Project (CFP)

Elizabeth Gaines is the founder and CEO of Children’s Funding Project (CFP). Begun in 2018, to help communities and states expand equitable opportunities for children and youth through strategic public financing. CFP is the response to Elizabeth’s 30 year career in child advocacy that persistently led her to question whether adequate resources were being directed to children. She began her career leading after-school and community-based youth programs at the Atwood Community Center in Madison, Wisconsin. She later served as youth policy analyst for Citizens for Missouri’s Children, followed by 13 years at the Forum for Youth Investment, where she helped policy leaders develop tools and techniques to improve their use of data, increase their policy alignment, and more efficiently apply resources for greater impact.

As an expert on children’s policy at the state and local level, Elizabeth has worked with communities in nearly all 50 states to establish children’s cabinets, conduct fiscal maps, and pursue dedicated funding for youth. She currently leads the Fund IRL coalition, working directly with state attorneys general to ensure that settlement dollars from lawsuits against Meta and other social media companies are tracked, protected, and invested in in-person programming like afterschool, mentoring, arts and preventive mental health, rather than absorbed into general state budgets. Since 2018, Elizabeth has guided CFP’s work with national networks, state and local governments, advocates, and youth leaders. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Elizabeth attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison and currently resides in Washington, D.C.