Even Start offers grants to support local family literacy projects that integrate early childhood education, adult literacy, parenting education, and interactive parent and child literacy activities for low-income families. To participate in an Even Start funded program, parents must be eligible for services under the Adult Education and Family Literacy Act and children must be seven years old or younger. All Even Start sites must address adult education and literacy, which includes Adult Basic Education (ABE), English as a Second Language (ESL) and training for obtaining the General Education Development (GED) Certificate. The parenting education component of a program includes instruction for parents on supporting their child's education. Finally, the early childhood education component directly prepares children for school. Specific methods for addressing these areas may vary by site, which allows a program to tailor its services to the needs of its population.

The Even Start Literacy Program is an education program for economically challenged families that is designed to improve the academic achievement of young children and their parents, especially in the areas of reading and language.

Even Start is periodically evaluated by the U.S. Department of Education. Results of these evaluations have been mixed. The most recent evaluation studied the impact of the program on 463 randomly selected families from 18 Even Start projects. Data were collected at pre-intervention, post-intervention one year later, and in a one-year follow-up. Results showed that the only significant difference between the control and experimental groups were teacher ratings of behavior problems using the Social Skills Rating System. Teachers rated elementary school age experimental group children as having fewer behavior problems than control group children. However, the 18 projects included in this evaluation are not representative of all Even Start projects, and the effectiveness may vary by project.