Permanency Innovations Initiative Evaluation

The Permanency Innovations Initiative (PII) is a federal demonstration project designed to improve outcomes for foster care children who face the most serious barriers to finding permanent homes.

Six agencies implemented innovative interventions to help specific subgroups of children and youth achieve permanency in fewer than 3 years. 

The PII Evaluation applied implementation science to develop and test evidence-based programs to address long-term foster care. The evaluation included site-level and cross-site components and examined both implementation and effectiveness. The evaluation team collected, analyzed, and reported site data; studied implementation, administrative, and cost data; reviewed benchmark data; and disseminated findings to policy makers, practitioners, and researchers.

The evaluation was based on the “PICO” framework, referring to population, intervention, comparison, and outcome. The framework guided a participatory process of formulating research questions and designing and implementing evaluation plans to answer them. The evaluation team provided technical assistance to sites through visits and phone calls on such issues as protection of human subjects, randomization, data collection, quality assurance, cross-site evaluation, and cost analysis.

The findings described the PII interventions and the contexts in which they were carried out, the technical assistance models used, implementation, cost implications, and effectiveness in achieving permanency and well-being outcomes.