A Child Impact Statement Reporting System, created to promote child well-being in Shelby County, is hailed as a national model.By 2007, the children of Memphis and Shelby County, Tennessee were in crisis. Twenty percent of Tennessee children were born in Shelby County alone, and more than half of these children were born into poverty each year. In this essay, Michael Schmidt and Julie Coffey detail a strategy developed by the county to insure that policy decisions would strengthen the well-being of children through the creation and implementation of a Child Impact Statement Reporting System. This system consists of a web-based software application that evaluates the effectiveness of policy decisions on behalf of children. It has been hailed by First Focus as one of the most innovative “big ideas” in child advocacy this year.