Introduction
This is one of a series of illustrative case studies, under the auspices of the Friends of Evidence, describing powerful approaches to evidence being taken by initiatives currently engaged in efforts to improve outcomes among disadvantaged children, families, youth and neighborhoods.
Catawba County, a rural community in the foothills of western North Carolina, has a long unique history of funding and programmatic innovation that puts improved outcomes for County residents at the forefront of its efforts. This history makes it fertile ground for creating new, results-focused strategies for supporting children and families involved in the child welfare system.
Catawba County Social Services (CCSS) child welfare operations, in response to increased national emphasis on child well-being and healthy life-time family connections for youth exiting foster care, has pioneered an approach to post-permanency support services. The Child Wellbeing Project, as it is called, was initially designed to investigate which long-term social services would be most effective to improving life outcomes of children and their families once exiting foster care. This system change initiative comes in an environment where only modest attention has been paid to supporting children and their families after the legal case is closed. Although there is some available federal support for adoptive families and guardian services, support of reunified families is limited to what jurisdictions can invest from other limited federal funding streams and their own resources.
The Catawba Child Wellbeing Project started with a conversation and a bold idea: in 2006, Rhett Mabry, then Vice-President of Child Care at The Duke Endowment (now President), met Bobby Boyd, then Catawba County Director of Social Services at a conference, and expressed a desire to build ‘the Cadillac of Child Welfare Systems’ to reduce the imbalance of services to families post-care compared to available in-care services. They discussed how children and families received support from social workers and community services while the children were in foster care; however, once the child returned home, families were expected to seamlessly pick up the threads of their lives. This was not a new concern to staff: Catawba County social workers knew that children sometimes re-entered foster care after being reunified with their birth families, placed in guardianships or adopted. Staff wondered if they might do more to ensure not only that children had permanent families, but thrived once with their families. The collective theory was that improved post-care support for families will help the children grow into healthier, more stable adults than what the research suggests is the norm among children leaving foster care. Short-term goals center on stability but long-term outcomes focus on well-being as indicated in six different areas.
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The results from the Child Wellbeing Project were sufficient to continue the partnership between CCSS and The Duke Endowment as they sought to offer the field a viable and effective model of post permanency support. This case study looks at the Child Wellbeing Project through the lens of how the initiative uses and generates evidence in order to achieve its goals. We will examine both how the Child Wellbeing Project came to choose the Success Coach model and how they maintain program fidelity as they conduct their randomized trial. Our analysis is organized around characteristics of a more inclusive approach to evidence, as identified by the Center for the Study of Social Policy and the Friends of Evidence. We examine each of these characteristics in turn.
