The NC Data Governance Project is a collaboration between the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services (NC DHHS) Division of Child Development and Early Education (DCDEE) and the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (FPG). The purpose of this project is to establish written policies and procedures that guide the way all DCDEE staff share information across the Division and with external key partners.

FPG Technical Assistance Specialists have a long history of successfully supporting early childhood systems across the nation to build high-quality systems and services that result in positive outcomes for infants, toddlers, and young children, especially those at risk of delays or with disabilities and their families. FPG TA specialists have been building system capacity of early childhood systems and programs to develop and improve components of their infrastructure to ensure that leadership and policies, personnel, funding, standards, accountability, and data systems are aligned for more than 50 years. TA Specialists accomplish this by incorporating effective TA principles, systems change principles, implementation science, improvement science, and strategies from evaluation and data-driven decision making. The FPG TA team for the NC Data Governance project has specific expertise and experience working with state-level leaders of early childhood programs in multiple states to facilitate an organizational process and a structure for information governance, including organizing program area/agency staff to improve information quality through the systematic creation and enforcement of policies, roles, responsibilities, and procedures, and  providing support to state-level leaders of early childhood programs in multiple states to ensure the  quality (timeliness, completeness, accuracy and reliability), integrity, and implementation of procedures to ensure consistent application of policies.

Through the work of the NC Data Governance Project, FPG provides DCDEE with expertise related to short- and long-term projects that will help establish a system that supports integrated and consistent information sharing across programs within DCDEE and also with DCDEE's external key partners. More specifically, this collaboration advances the following goals of DCDEE:

1. Improving federal and legislative reporting on the impact and progress of DCDEE projects and programs
2. Building a consistent framework and structure for using and sharing information  
3. Increasing public understanding of information sharing policies and procedures of DCDEE and NC DHHS