Products of the Evaluation of Family to Family
In 1992, the Annie E. Casey Foundation embarked on a major initiative to help child welfare agencies in five states respond more effectively to children who were being placed in out-of-home care. Family to Family has now expanded beyond the original group of state and local partners to include neighborhoods in some of the nation's largest cities as well as rural communities.
An explicit premise of Family to Family is that the planning, implementation, and evaluation of child welfare policy and practices have to be guided by clear and specific goals, and that progress toward those goals requires good performance data. Throughout the initiative, an evaluation team from UNC's Jordan Institute for Families and the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) worked with grantees to develop their capacity for self-evaluation. The efforts of the evaluation team, grantees' self-evaluation teams, and the Family to Family technical assistance team produced a set of tools for self-evaluation that are available free of charge.
The final report of the evaluation team and an assessment of the challenges of implementing the initiative are available for immediate downloading in Acrobatâ format. Members of the evaluation team also have made presentations about Family to Family at a number of recent professional conferences. Information about these presentations and other publications related to the initiative are available from the principal investigator, Lynn Usher of the UNC School of Social Work.
School of Social Work Jordan Institute