In 1997, the Finance Project convened a roundtable meeting of representatives from organizations who have been working to improve the financing of services and supports to young children and their families; the meeting was convened with the purpose of mapping an agenda for future research, development, and demonstration to support improvements in early childhood financing. This paper organizes the meeting's recommendations into a coherent framework for a research and demonstration agenda. Three principles emerging from the meeting are highlighted: the need for community-based, family-focused, preventive, and comprehensive services; the importance of cultivating informal support systems and formalized services; and the realization that financing strategies are a means to an end, inextricably linked to strategies for service delivery. The paper begins by outlining the major strategic directions for change that emerged from the roundtable discussion, including realigning financing strategies to adapt to changing social policy environment, making better use of fiscal resources, developing the infrastructure to support improved financing, and building public will, leadership, and resources to support change. Section 2 discusses how these strategic directions translate into a research, demonstration, and tool-building agenda, with proposed activities in three major categories: (1) research, including theory building, policy research, and evaluation; (2) demonstration projects, especially how a wide range of financing strategies can achieve better results for children and families; and (3) tool-building, involving further developing and making accessible to states and communities a wide variety of models and tools, such as results-based budgeting, resource mapping, and the use of data to inform decision making. (KB)