Design for the Cross-Center Evaluation of the Child Welfare Capacity Building Collaborative, 2020–2025

Child welfare agencies must function at an optimal level to meet their mandate of caring for abused and neglected children.

The Children’s Bureau has provided training, technical assistance, and other supports to public child welfare jurisdictions—states, tribes, and courts—through a series of resource centers. These centers have varied in their structure and focus over time but were all designed to build the organizational capacity and functioning of jurisdictions to meet federal requirements, advance practice, and improve outcomes for children, youth, and families.

For more than a decade, JBA and its partners have been contracted to design and implement independent, cross-center evaluations of these efforts in collaboration with the Children’s Bureau and service providers. This brief describes the rigorous, utilization-focused evaluation design developed to assess the activities, processes, collaboration, and effectiveness of the current training and technical assistance approach, the Child Welfare Capacity Building Collaborative.