Poster #53 - Community-centered Developmental Evaluation in the Child Welfare System: Ending the Need for Group Placement

• In Event: Poster Session 04

Abstract

Currently, over 407,000 children within the child welfare system reside in out-of-home care in the United States, and about 38,800 of these youth are living in group placement settings, including group homes and institutional facilities (US Children’s Bureau, 2021). Black, multiracial, and American Indian/Alaska Native youth continue to be overrepresented in group and institutional settings. Therefore, ending the need for group and institutional placements is a key strategy for reducing disproportionate harm to young people of color in the child welfare system.

The Annie E. Casey Foundation, in partnership with Casey Family Programs, is providing intensive technical assistance and capacity building services to communities (e.g., youth and families with lived experience, community-based organizations, public child welfare entities, policymakers) to support them in collectively co-designing solutions to reach the common goal for needing to utilize congregate foster care settings. The Foundation is also partnering with James Bell Associates to conduct a descriptive process evaluation to: 1) identify the factors associated with success in eliminating group placement, 2) systematically document the key processes and activities communities implement to end foster care group placements, and 3) summarize lessons learned from the three demonstration communities (Connecticut, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma).

Co-design actively involves all stakeholders, especially the impacted populations including youth who have experienced foster care, in the design process to help ensure the results/outcomes meet their needs and the strategies are sustained within the communities over time. This process requires time for relationship, capacity, and consensus-building across all partners in the co-design space. As such, conducting evaluations within this context requires flexibility to adapt to the complex and evolving conditions and dynamics within each community. The evaluation team is using a developmental evaluation approach (Patton, 2010) to address its evaluation goals and engage the Foundation and demonstration communities in strategic learning for growth and innovation. Developmental evaluation works well in contexts in which "implementation is likely to change in response to emerging conditions on the ground" (USAID, 2019).

Key features of the evaluation include:
• Participation in Ending the Need for Group Placement project meetings to gain a full understanding implementation and opportunity to adapt and align evaluation activities;
• Multi-phased evaluation design based on key milestones in ENGP implementation, with flexibility to refine evaluation questions and data collection tools for each phase;
• Mixed methods approach to comprehensively capture key ENGP processes and community experiences engaging in this work;
• Timely data collection to provide ongoing feedback loops back to communities and the Foundation;
• Implementation of learning logs to document stakeholder reflections and facilitate emergent learning; and
• Use of community-specific and selected performance measurement data to identify progress toward eliminating group placement.

This poster presentation will describe the ENGP evaluation approach in further detail, and will outline how the evaluation team has used a developmental evaluation approach to meet the Foundation and demonstration communities where they are at. The authors will also reflect on challenges and lessons learned associated with incorporating this approach with organizations that are accustomed to standardized planning, accountability, and oversight processes.

Authors

• Chi Connie Park, James Bell Associates
  Presenting Author

• Joanna DeWolfe

• Allison K Holmes, Annie E. Casey Foundation