A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Making Information Work For You - 1997

Comprehensive Strategies For Children And Families: Collecting And Using Good Information For A Good Cause

A consensus has emerged in recent years that the fragmented systems serving children and families need to be restructured and integrated in ways that make them accessible, family-focused, and able to accommodate cultural differences. Nationwide, collaborative partnerships involving schools, families, and other community stakeholders are learning that they are better able to improve results for children and families through "comprehensive strategies"--approaches that bring together an array of resources in order to improve access to education, health care, and human services; develop individual skills; foster local opportunities; and coordinate and align systems. Comprehensive strategies take many forms:

• Walbridge Caring Communities (St. Louis, Missouri), New Beginnings (San Diego, California), and I.S. 218 (New York City) are examples of community-sponsored initiatives to revitalize schools and their surrounding communities by delivering a wide array of child and family services at neighborhood schools.

• Kentucky's Family Resource/Youth Service Center initiative, New Jersey's School-Based Youth Services Program, Georgia's Initiative for Children and Families, and California's Healthy Start school-linked services initiative demonstrate state leadership in reforming systems of service delivery for children and families statewide.

• The Securing the Health and Safety of Urban Children initiative, supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and Community Partnerships for Healthy Children, sponsored by the Sierra Health Foundation, illustrate the commitment of private philanthropic foundations to community-based strategies for developing and integrating local resources in support of children and families.

The federal government also lends support to comprehensive strategies through legislative initiatives and pilot programs that explicitly encourage partnerships between public and private organizations to address the needs of children and families holistically. Many federal efforts--from the school-linked services support in the Department of Education's Elementary and Secondary Education Act to the Family Preservation and Support programs of the Department of Health and Human Services--provide incentives to state and local agencies to link with community resources in serving children and families.

"Comprehensive Strategies" Offer Comprehensive Solutions

Comprehensive strategies is an intentionally broad term that encompasses comprehensive community initiatives (Connell et al., 1995), service integration (Agranoff 1991), school-linked services (Behrman 1992), coordinated services (Crowson & Boyd 1993), full-service schools (Dryfoos 1994), community schools (Children's Aid Society 1993), and other efforts that link organizations and families within communities in order to strengthen them all. Schools play an important part, although not always the central role, in many of these activities. They are the base of operations for many children for a good part of their day. Also, in many communities, schools are closely affiliated with neighborhoods, often even helping to define them.

Increasingly, schools are joining with new partners to develop strategies that reflect the unique strengths and needs of our heterogeneous nation. What unites the diversity of comprehensive strategies in American communities is their ultimate intention--improving the lives of children and families. They also share the common understanding that single organizations cannot achieve that ultimate goal alone. In undertaking comprehensive strategies, schools and other organizations are being asked to expand their vision of children, families, and communities; broaden their outlook on their own roles in achieving that vision; communicate and share authority with new partners, including families; and become accountable to a wide array of audiences that have a stake or interest in their work. That's a tall order.

What unites the diversity of comprehensive strategies in widely different American communities is their ultimate intention--improving the lives of children and families.

Purpose and Audience of This Guide

Good information is a valuable resource in facing the challenges of designing and implementing comprehensive strategies. This guide book is intended to help partners in comprehensive strategies generate good information as they try to remake services, organizations, systems, and communities. It offers principles, processes, and tools for using evaluation to focus comprehensive strategies on the shared goal of the partners--improving the lives of children and families.

If you are your organization's representative to a partnership, a coordinator of programs involved in a comprehensive strategy, a staff member offering support to a partnership, or a person responsible for information collection, analysis, or reporting for a comprehensive strategy, this guide book is for you. It can help you and your partners set your course and assess your progress toward your goals. With this guide book, you can be a more informed producer and consumer of evaluation information.

This guide focuses on comprehensive strategies that stem from partnerships in order to show that evaluation occurs within the context of other issues, such as developing collaboration and implementing partnerships. This book does not offer guidance on establishing a partnership, however. For help in designing, implementing, and maintaining a collaborative partnership, please see Putting the pieces together: Comprehensive school-linked strategies for children and families (U.S. Department of Education 1996).

Evaluation as a Continuous Process

Improving results for children and families takes time, and it is essential to measure results at all stages of planning and implementing a comprehensive strategy. Partners need good information right from the start to assess needs and strengths, design interventions, and marshal resources. The need for information continues as initiatives demonstrate short-term and interim results--that is, as they change relationships, programs, staffing patterns, and service configurations and, perhaps, begin seeing results in participants' lives. For mature comprehensive strategies, good information can provide evidence of long-term results for children and families, such as improvements in health, student performance, and adult literacy. At each of these stages, collecting information and using it to make decisions about the comprehensive strategy increases the chances that the effort will succeed.

Continuous evaluation produces useful information throughout the operation of a comprehensive strategy. Instead of viewing evaluation as an activity that determines whether something worked --and therefore as something to do late in the life of a program--this guide book defines evaluation more broadly, as the ongoing production of information for continuous improvement of a comprehensive strategy:

Evaluation is an important ongoing process that supports the organization striving for excellence in the achievement of its mission. It is a process of asking good questions, gathering information to answer them, and making decisions based on those answers (Gray 1993, p. ix).

Continuous evaluation can produce information on the conditions and resources of your school, neighborhood, or community. A continuous evaluation process helps collaborative partners spell out their assumptions about how to address important problem areas. Assumptions about how to create change in those areas also are articulated as partners design strategies that have a realistic chance of improving results.

Rather than evaluation being done to you by an outside evaluator, continuous evaluation is something you and your partners do for yourselves so that you understand what you are doing and accomplishing.

Through continuous evaluation, you can monitor whether the strategies are carried out as intended. Indicators of short-term and interim results can suggest the need for mid-course corrections that improve a strategy's chances of positive long-term impacts. Finally, continuous evaluation assesses longer-term benefits and may suggest further adaptations, such as changing the intensity of services, adding services to enhance impacts, or targeting particular groups that have benefited most (or least).

Partners in comprehensive strategies will find themselves at different stages in their movement toward more holistic approaches to serving children and families. Continuous evaluation can help strengthen strategies at all stages by addressing internal management concerns as well as external needs for accountability and support. Feedback on what and how the initiative is doing is essential to an initiative's improvement and sustainability.

Viewing evaluation as an ongoing process shifts the responsibility and authority for evaluation from outside the partnership to inside. Rather than evaluation being done to you by an outside evaluator, continuous evaluation is something you and your partners do for yourselves so that you understand what you are doing and accomplishing. Taking charge of your own continuous evaluation process builds capacity within collaborating organizations for analyzing information and improving decision-making.

How Can This Guide Help You?

This guide book offers suggestions for how good information can help strengthen emerging comprehensive strategies and also can document impacts on children, families, and communities. Because comprehensive strategies will be unique to their communities, we do not provide specific prescriptions for how partners in comprehensive strategies should engage in evaluation. Instead, we offer a menu of possibilities from which to choose as you incorporate results-focused information into your local strategy. Good evaluations can be as diverse and multifaceted as the strategies that they assess. A good evaluation approach meets the unique information needs of partners and stakeholders in the community in which it is used.

Good evaluations can be as diverse and multifaceted as the strategies that they assess.

This guide book contains four additional chapters, plus a Tool Kit. Chapter 2 presents a framework for continuous evaluation, highlighting cross-cutting evaluation principles and the various stages of planning and conducting a good evaluation. Chapters 3 and 4 expand on these ideas, exploring the stages of the evaluation framework outlined in Chapter 2. In both chapters, we suggest questions to consider, ways to obtain information to answer them, and examples of how having good information has strengthened real-world strategies at each stage in their development. Chapter 5 describes key internal and external resources that can enrich your evaluation. The Tool Kit contains tables and sample forms that support points made in the text.

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