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Session Title: Transforming the Context of Child Welfare Practice: The Evaluation of Family to Family
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Panel Session 289 to be held in Panzacola Section F2 on Thursday, Nov 12, 1:40 PM to 3:10 PM
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Sponsored by the Human Services Evaluation TIG
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| Chair(s): |
| Lynn Usher, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, lynnusher@unc.edu
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| Abstract:
Sponsored by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, the Family to Family foster care reform initiative is being conducted in 12 large urban child welfare systems in Arizona, California, Colorado, Kentucky, New York, North Carolina, and Ohio. The anchor-site phase began in 2006 and ends in 2009. The initiative seeks to transform child welfare practice through four core strategies: building community partnerships; resource family development and support; team decision-making; and self-evaluation. The underlying logic is that these strategies are mutually reinforcing and, if effectively implemented, will identify and draw community resources into decision-making and family support. In addition to helping sites develop their capacity for self-evaluation, the evaluation team has compiled data describing the implementation of each strategy, the exposure of individual children to key elements of Family to Family practice, and the safety and permanency outcomes they have experienced. The panel will present the results of analysis in each area.
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Implementing the Core Strategies of Family to Family
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| Daniel Webster, University of California Berkeley, dwebster@berkeley.edu
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Some Family to Family strategies are only indirectly linked to the experiences of individual children involved with the child welfare system. Monitoring implementation in these areas involves efforts such as tracking an inventory of foster families to assess the constraint the system faces in placing children with families rather than congregate care facilities. However, the strategy of team decisionmaking (TDM) uses a database to capture information about each TDM meeting, including participant characteristics, the presence of key practice elements, and recommendations from the meeting. Data are now available for more than 50,000 meetings at involving the removal of children from their homes and their movement from one placement setting to another. This paper will summarize what the TDM database reveals about the exposure of individual children to key elements of Family to Family practice and describe how the level of exposure is related to recommendations coming out of those meetings.
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The Impact of Family to Family on Safety and Permanency Outcomes
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| Judith Wildfire, Wildfire Associates Inc, jwildfire@wildfireassociates.com
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The Family to Family evaluation team has devoted considerable effort to building a database in each anchor site to track the experience of individual children from initial reports of abuse and neglect through any experiences in out-of-home care. By linking referral reports with data about each placement while in child welfare custody and arraying the data in a longitudinal format, it is possible to create a statistical case history for each child. A further linkage to TDM data makes it possible to assess the impact of key elements of Family to Family practice on safety and permanency outcomes. This paper will describe the multivariate analyses undertaken by the evaluation team to gauge impact based on varying levels of exposure to these key elements across anchor sites. The analysis will encompass the experience of all children whose initial involvement with the child welfare systems in these sites occurred between 2005 and 2008.
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Building Effective Community Partnerships With Public Child Welfare Agencies: Lessons From the Field
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| David Crampton, Case Western Reserve University, david.crampton@case.edu
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The Family to Family initiative seeks to develop partnerships between neighborhood organizations and public child welfare agencies. These partnerships can help recruit and support foster parents, and provide support to families who might otherwise receive child protection services. This presentation describes the implementation of the community partnership strategies in eleven diverse Family to Family communities in six states. A common set of implementation challenges are reviewed, including changes in agency leadership, limited buy-in from frontline staff, reduced budgets and staffing levels, and negative media coverage. Examples of how these communities addressed these challenges are also presented. We review the extent to which these practices are applicable across diverse communities and how these strategies have been adapted to meet local needs. Evidence of the impact of these partnerships is presented along with a discussion of how to evaluate community partnerships in child protection work.
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Organizational Effectiveness and Family to Family Implementation: A Roadmap for Community-Based Program Improvement
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| Thomas Crea, Boston College, creat@bc.edu
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Program evaluators are devoting increased attention to contextual influences on program implementation and practice fidelity. Once such influence is the extent to which organizational factors help or hinder program implementation. This presentation examines recent findings from a pilot survey of organizational excellence (the Survey of Organizational Excellence) given to child welfare workers and supervisors in two Family to Family anchor sites in Kentucky (N=284) and California (N=284). Specific attention is paid to how five dimensions of organizational effectiveness (work group, accommodations, organizational features, information, and personal) and their related constructs are related to implementation indicators of each of the four core strategies of Family to Family and overall perceptions of the initiative. Quantitative survey findings, and open-ended comments, are interpreted in light of their usefulness for agency managers to improve implementation of the initiative and changes in agency practices.
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