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April 2021Vol. 22, No. 4The Building Capacity to Evaluate Child Welfare Community Collaborations to Strengthen and Preserve

The Building Capacity to Evaluate Child Welfare Community Collaborations to Strengthen and Preserve Families (CWCC) project, which supports the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation in the Administration for Children and Families within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, was designed to help the Children's Bureau assist states, communities, and tribes in building, implementing, and evaluating proactive, strengths-based prevention strategies. These maltreatment prevention strategies seek to reduce new referrals, unnecessary removals of children from their homes, and foster care entries. CWCC also seeks to find out how data are being used within and across agencies to improve their services and outcomes, common factors associated with success or difficulties, and how efforts can be sustained beyond the project.

CWCC primarily supports Children's Bureau efforts in two ways: providing evaluation-related technical assistance to increase grantees' evaluation capacity and evaluating each cohort to see how their maltreatment prevention approaches were developed and implemented. This cross-site evaluation documented leadership approaches, integration strategies, and recruitment and assessment methods.

CWCC guides grantees through designing a high-quality process and outcome evaluation, including crafting a theory of change and formulating targeted research questions, methodologies, and outcome measurements. CWCC then provides support to the grantee-designed evaluations and analyzes and distributes the results so that other communities can benefit from the findings.

This project will collect data between spring 2020 and summer 2024. To learn more, refer to the Building Capacity to Evaluate Child Welfare Community Collaborations (CWCC) to Strengthen and Preserve Families 2018-2024 webpage.