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On Thursday, August 20, more than 300 civic leaders, philanthropists, families, and mayors from across the country gathered at the Austin Central Library for Growing Up Austin. Mayor Kirk Watson shared what nearly a year of research had revealed about childhood in Austin, set five goals for the next five years, and challenged the community to judge the city’s success by the experience of its children.
Nearly a year earlier, Mayor Watson had launched GenATX around a governing idea: child well-being should be central to how Austin defines civic success. His question was direct: Has the economic engine Austin built over decades created a city where families can stay, children can thrive, and prosperity reaches every child?
GenATX now gives Austin a way to answer that question. Working with Mayor Watson’s team and United Way for Greater Austin, CivicSol led the research, engagement, strategy, and production behind a first-of-its-kind child well-being framework. Our team convened more than 60 leaders through a World Café, mapped Austin’s child-serving ecosystem, tested the framework with local practitioners and national experts, reviewed more than 40 research sources, and assembled a 47-indicator benchmark covering the 50 largest U.S. cities.
The complete framework, findings, scorecard, and city comparison tool are available at genatx.civicsol.com.
The first challenge was deciding what Austin should measure
Cities routinely track individual measures such as graduation rates, insurance coverage, and infant mortality. Those measures matter, but each offers a narrow view of childhood. GenATX needed a framework that could show how the conditions surrounding a child work together and where a city has the ability to improve them.
The research and engagement converged around three aspirations for every child: healthy, safe, and happy.
A healthy child grows physically, mentally, and emotionally with the care, nutrition, movement, and connection needed to thrive. A safe child grows up in a stable and trustworthy environment, protected from serious harm and free to explore. A happy child experiences joy, belonging, and purpose, with confidence that their presence matters.
Happiness gives the framework its most distinctive dimension. National and international frameworks consistently recognize mental well-being, belonging, and connection as essential to childhood, yet cities rarely attempt to understand those experiences alongside health and safety. GenATX places them within the same frame.
The research also established six principles that shaped the benchmark. It showed that child well-being operates as a system, mental health influences every other outcome, safety includes both protection and the freedom to explore, the early years compound across a lifetime, and family stability shapes how children fare. It also warned that citywide averages can conceal deep differences among children and neighborhoods.
That final principle became central to what Austin learned.
Austin needed three comparisons
No single comparison could tell Austin what it needed to know. We therefore examined the city from three vantage points.
The national benchmark compares Austin with the 50 largest U.S. cities. A six-city Texas group shows how Austin performs among communities operating within the same state policy environment. A third group compares Austin with ten technology and knowledge-economy cities, including Boston, Denver, San Francisco, and Seattle, that compete with Austin for families, talent, and investment.
The 47 indicators draw from verified public sources, including the American Community Survey, Child Opportunity Index, CDC, FBI, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, National Center for Education Statistics, and Trust for Public Land. Every indicator documents whether the underlying geography is the city, county, metropolitan area, school district, or another consistent unit. Any value that could not be verified from a primary source is left blank, with no estimates or interpolation used to fill the gap.
These decisions make the comparison transparent and repeatable while keeping the benchmark focused on learning, comparison, and action.
Austin’s strong outcomes rest on systems that need work
The benchmark confirms that, by national standards, Austin is one of the strongest large cities in America for children.
Austin ranks in the national top 15 for healthy birth weight, infant mortality, prenatal care, and childhood asthma burden. It has the ninth-lowest violent crime rate, the fifth-highest median family income, the ninth-lowest child poverty rate, and the ninth-highest score on the Child Opportunity Index. Within Texas, Austin ranks first or second on 36 of the 47 indicators.
The picture changes when Austin is compared with its technology and knowledge-economy peers. Austin falls within the bottom three on 17 of the 47 indicators. The pattern led to the benchmark’s central finding, which Mayor Watson put plainly: “Our strengths are in outcomes. Our gaps are in the systems behind those outcomes.”
The sharpest evidence concerns the public benefits intended to reach children and families. Austin ranks 50th among the 50 largest cities in both children’s Medicaid and CHIP coverage and SNAP enrollment. The city has high family incomes and comparatively low child poverty, yet one in seven children experiences food insecurity, the highest rate among Austin’s technology peers. The problem is reach. Awareness, paperwork, renewal, and weak handoffs keep eligible families from connecting with support that already exists.
The same pattern appears elsewhere. Austin spends $12,492 per public school student, ranking 36th among the 50 cities. Among its technology peers, Austin spends more per student than Raleigh and less than the other nine cities. Austin ranks 47th of 48 cities for recreational facilities. It has the strongest mental health provider base among major Texas cities, with 403 providers per 100,000 residents, while ranking last among its technology peers.
Taken together, these findings describe a city with strong institutions, capable organizations, and substantial resources whose systems remain difficult for families to navigate. Programs often operate in parallel, leaving families to make the connections on their own.
Austin is growing while its child population is shrinking
One finding carried particular weight at the launch. Austin had 17,091 fewer children in 2024 than it did in 2019, a decline of 9.3 percent. During those same five years, the city grew and median family income rose by 39 percent.
The benchmark presents that change as a signal Austin cannot ignore. Housing, childcare, and the daily cost of raising a family are placing pressure on teachers, nurses, first responders, small business owners, and other working families who contribute to the city while finding it increasingly difficult to remain.
Mayor Watson framed the choice facing Austin around whether families can stay, put down roots, raise their children, and eventually see those children build futures of their own in the city.
The averages conceal how differently Austin’s children experience the city
Austin’s children are more diverse than its adult population. Forty-three percent are Hispanic, and 37 percent have at least one parent born outside the United States. Their experiences also vary sharply by race, ethnicity, and neighborhood.
A Black child in Austin is 2.4 times as likely to live in poverty as a white child. Hispanic children face a 15.7 percentage-point health insurance gap. Across Austin neighborhoods, the share of families struggling to cover basic expenses ranges from 8 percent to 50 percent.
These disparities change how the city’s strongest rankings should be understood. Citywide progress matters most when the systems behind it reach children whose daily experiences remain far from the average.
The years that matter most remain the hardest to see
The work also exposed a national measurement gap. No American city has consistent, comparable city-level data on children’s mental health, life satisfaction, belonging, or early childhood development.
Cities can measure birth outcomes and count mental health providers, yet they cannot consistently determine whether a young child is developing on track, whether a teenager feels connected, or whether children believe they belong in their communities. GenATX names those blind spots so Austin can begin building better ways to see them.
As Mayor Watson told the audience, “The years that matter most are also the years we see and support the least clearly.”
Five priorities connect the findings to action
Drawing on the research and community engagement, Mayor Watson named five priorities for the next five years and brought forward a lead organization for each. Together, the priorities turn his broader vision for Austin into a focused community commitment with clear leadership and a structure for accountability.
United Way for Greater Austin will lead the work to strengthen the earliest years, alongside Early Matters Greater Austin, Success By 6, and other early childhood partners. St. David’s Foundation will lead efforts to enroll every eligible child in health coverage and food support, working with Central Health and community partners. Communities In Schools of Central Texas will lead the work to build mental healthcare around children, bringing schools, providers, and community organizations together.
Austin Parks Foundation will lead the activation of parks, libraries, community centers, and other third spaces with the people and programming that create belonging. The Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce will work with Austin Community College, employers, educational institutions, and workforce organizations to clear the path from classroom to career.
The five priorities form a connected system: strengthen the earliest years, enroll every eligible child, build mental healthcare around children, activate third spaces, and clear the path from classroom to career. Over the next phase, partners will translate each priority into a shared work plan with clear goals, named owners, and a way to measure progress openly.
Mayor Watson also committed GenATX to identifying, testing, and scaling promising approaches across all five priorities. He described innovation as the mechanism that can make every priority stronger.
The initial research was supported by FirstDay Foundation, H-E-B, Texas Mutual, and Wells Fargo. GenATX will move forward through private philanthropic support, without the use of City funds.
The next five years will be the test
The benchmark gives Austin something it has never had: a shared baseline for understanding how its children are doing and a public standard for judging whether the work ahead is making a difference.
Over the next five years, GenATX partners will be able to return to the same indicators, measure where systems are reaching families more effectively, and identify where progress remains uneven. The commitment is to track that work openly, with clear goals and named organizations responsible for moving each priority forward.
The framework also gives other cities a place to begin. Its definitions, indicators, sources, and limitations are documented across the 50 largest U.S. cities, allowing mayors and civic leaders to examine their own communities through the same lens. Mayor Watson invited the visiting mayors to use the framework, test it against their own cities, and help improve it.
Austin’s immediate responsibility is closer to home. The city has strong outcomes, deep institutional capacity, and hundreds of organizations working on behalf of children. GenATX creates a way to connect those assets around a common understanding of what children need and a disciplined way to determine whether their daily lives are improving.
“Great cities build skylines,” Mayor Watson said in closing. “The best cities build childhood.”
The benchmark makes that ambition measurable, and the five priorities give Austin a structure for acting on it. The next five years will show whether the city can make it real for every child.
“Great cities build skylines. The best cities build childhood.”
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