This session will cover cost-effective strategies for conducting evaluation studies in child and family services that use a co-design approach. It will address:

  1. Quasi-experimental design innovations in program evaluation for public and private child welfare agencies that take less than a year to complete and cost less than $70,000
  2. How to design evaluations so they meet the criteria for acceptance by the Family First Prevention Clearinghouse
  3. How to design and carry out your research in a way that pays attention to equity and authentic involvement of the community

Presenters will also present lessons learned from recent return on investment evaluations of Family Resource Centers in California, Colorado, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Participants will be encouraged to share their experience and wisdom related to the session’s topics.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Peter Pecora
Managing Director of Research Services, Professor
Casey Family Programs

Brittany Mihalec-Adkins
Research Scientist II
Child Trends

In today’s rapidly evolving social services landscape, integrating data-informed decision making is no longer optional—it’s essential. This session will explore ways to examine and answer the key questions asked in operationalizing COA Accreditation standards for improved service delivery. We’ll show how data can empower social workers and leaders, ultimately improving outcomes for children and families.

Participants will gain insights from a COA Accreditation volunteer peer reviewer and leader of a COA-accredited organization and be introduced to practical tools and techniques for accessing and leveraging data, including cutting-edge natural language processing (NLP) technologies. These innovations can convert qualitative data, such as case notes, into actionable insights, driving more informed decision-making processes.

This session aims to equip participants with the knowledge and tools necessary to achieve measurable continuous quality improvement results by integrating data insights on the health, safety, rights, and inclusion of people served in their daily operations. Participants will learn the value of asking and expeditiously being able to use data to answer their most persistent questions, which can maximize achieving and maintaining COA Accreditation and yield actionable steps to effectively leverage data in their roles.

Whether you are a front-line worker or an organizational leader, this presentation offers valuable, practical insights that can be applied to enhance service outcomes.

Join us to discover how asking the right questions and embracing data can enhance your organization’s service delivery, meet accreditation standards, and, most importantly, provide better support for the children and families you serve.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

LaTasha Roberson-Guifarro
Vice President, Chief Strategy & Innovations
Lutheran Child and Family Services of Illinois

Tracy Rohrdanz
Director of Customer Success
Augintel

The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention has released three opportunities for Building a Continuum of Care to Support Youth Success. This planning funding includes a fiscal realignment of programming to focus on prevention. JBS International and our partners have focused on delivering technical assistance to these grantees that has a holistic, family-centered, culturally relevant, and trauma-informed lens. In doing so, we have worked with planning committees around issues related to social determinants of health and other impediments to youth well-being. We are seeking to help youth thrive in the community and in parallel process the community will thrive.

This session will introduce the Continuum of Care framework. We will discuss the successes and challenges faced by grantees thus far in the planning processes. Much of the work being done requires creating and navigating partnerships and collaborations while including youth and family voice. This session will discuss strategies used to engage the necessary representation and participation occurs to plan a continuum that serves all youth and helps the community thrive.

Learning Objectives

Presenter

Jennie Cole-Mossman
Technical Expert Lead II
JBS International

In a world filled with uncertainty and challenges, finding moments of joy can become increasingly challenging. Yet, the research on the importance of joy in our lives is quite clear. Joy is paramount to our collective health and wellness. This thought-provoking and engaging presentation will explore the profound impact of joy on our mental and emotional well-being. Through inspiring anecdotes, research-backed insights, and practical strategies, this presentation will delve into the transformative power of joy in fostering resilience and cultivating hope.

Participants will explore the “science of joy” and how the intentional act of collecting joy can increase our personal resilience, as well as the resilience of those we are working with. Participants will be empowered to embrace joy as a catalyst for resilience, hope, and positive change in their lives and communities, as well as in the lives of individuals they are caring for. Join this session and discover the profound impact of joy in fueling a brighter, more resilient future.

Learning Objectives

Presenter

Christopher McLaughlin
Owner & Lead Consultant
Inspired Consulting Group, LLC

What happens when we apply a strengths-based, brain and behavioral science lens to build programs and policies that support families? Join us to explore the core tenants and benefits of 2-Generation (2Gen) principles in programs, institutions, and policies, as well as learn how to incorporate these tenants in practice.

You will hear from Ascend at the Aspen Institute about how 2Gen approaches build family well-being by intentionally and simultaneously working with children and the adults in their lives. By centering the goals of the whole family, 2Gen strategies work with families as experts and meaningfully engage parents and caregivers in designing policies and programs that affect them to develop holistic, integrated, and equity-focused solutions.

Then, you will learn about the application of 2Gen practices at New Moms, a Chicago-based organization engaging young families, through their executive skills coaching approach. Understanding how executive skills and other strengths-based brain and behavioral science strategies support decision making, resilience, goal setting, and habit formation can ultimately improve whole family well-being. In this session participants, too, will identify their own executive skills strengths on a digital self-assessment, and through an interactive guided discussion prompt, reflect on how those strengths help them achieve their goals – and the implication for 2Gen program design and delivery. Then, participants will complete a short design activity related to 2Gen coaching strategies, walking away with a new idea and an executive skills coaching practitioner toolkit to support next steps for taking action in your workplace.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Laura Zumdahl
President & CEO
New Moms

Sama Sabihi
Program Manager
Ascend at the Aspen Institute

This working session will open a space for exploring how narrative and mindset change efforts, which are underway across the sector, could be strengthened with evidence related to economic and concrete supports. In addition, there is a need to infuse the delivery of the economic and concrete support information in alignment with new messages that propel mindset change.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Gretchen Cusick
Senior Research Fellow
Chapin Hall

Hope is a cognitive process that can be enhanced, modeled, and, more importantly, restored during a crisis. It also may be one of the most critical factors to psychological well-being. This session will share insight from a project funded by the Department of Justice Office for Victims of Crime that extends hope science into law enforcement organizations.

Participants will learn how hope science can be applied to support staff at community-based organizations because, like law enforcement, they respond in crisis situations, work with people experiencing adversity, and endure secondhand trauma. This presentation will provide specific methods that can immediately be implemented to increase hopeful thinking and improve essential employee outcomes, as well as share strategies that can be used across the organizations as a framework for action for employee well-being. Recognizing the importance of community connection, presenters will highlight trust building and well-being work with systems, along with Social Current’s approach to equity, diversity, and inclusion, which emphasizes psychological safety in the workforce.

This workshop will encourage participant engagement and interaction. Participants will be able to assess their own hope and examine how the loss of hope may impact workforce, client, and community outcomes. Additionally, participants will have an opportunity to build strategies for nurturing hope that foster positive and strengths-based practices that value community connection.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Katie Carlson
Director of Wellness Initiatives
Marion County Sheriff’s Office

Romero Davis
Director of Practice Excellence
Social Current

Josh Friedman
CEO
Ten Eight Innovations

Laura Pinsoneault
CEO
Evaluation Plus

Do family support strategies make a difference? This workshop will begin with an update on Family Resource Centers (FRC) located across the U.S. and then highlight a wide range of FRC outcome and cost-benefit findings. Presenters will share the results of a new meta-analysis study that examined the impact of FRCs across key child welfare outcomes, including the rates of accepted child protective services referrals, substantiated child protective services referrals, and child placements in out-of-home care. After reviewing what we know about the cost-benefit of FRCs, presenters will close with information about the most promising funding streams to consider to pay for FRCs.

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Peter Pecora
Managing Director of Research Services
Casey Family Programs

Brenda McChesney
Co-Founder & Associate Director
National Family Support Network

Janica Lockhart
Chief Impact Officer
AKIN Family Services

Congreso de Latinos Unidos, a multi-service organization in Philadelphia, is using human-centered design (HCD) to engage funders and policymakers in the service design process—reimagining human services for its largely Latino population. Specializing in “last mile innovation,” Congreso uses its homegrown design toolkit to empower staff at the end-user client level to redesign their programs to generate data-rich insights leading to:

Congreso’s incorporation of design has created a powerful “feedback loop” between policymakers, funders and Congreso’s clients, ensuring the design of services is equitable and human centered. In taking ownership of the full feedback circuit, Congreso has positioned itself as a key link between policymakers and the end-user experience, ensuring future policies, funding, and service contracts account for the nuanced needs of its target population and greatly enhancing the impact and value that government funding seeks to provide.

As a recipient of multiple government funding streams, Congreso recognizes the disconnect between how services are conceived at the policy level and the actual experience of staff and clients in those programs. Often, services conceived of at the policy level don’t fully account for the nuanced experiences of the end-users, causing attrition, low utilization, and inefficient outcomes. Congreso uses HCD tools to shift this paradigm by bringing the two together, leading to improved client experience and outcomes, increased staff empowerment to influence change and the ability to perform data-driven funder advocacy to influence how policies and RFPs are crafted and implemented. 

This session will cover how Congreso utilizes HCD techniques to understand and improve upon the client experience in its programs, including investigating pain points, inefficiencies, and inequities, and how staff leverage those insights to influence change at the funding/policy level.

This session will cover: 

Learning Objectives

Presenters

Brendan Conlin
Chief Program Officer
Congreso de Latinos Unidos

Jamie Hughes
Vice President of Programmatic Development
Congreso de Latinos Unidos