Description

Kansas Strong for Children and Families Steering Committee collaborated across service systems to identify priority problem areas in child welfare. This storyboard shares results of quantitative and qualitative analyses related to child welfare outcomes of safety, permanency, and systemic factors. Findings indicated the need for innovation and improvements in agencies and court/legal systems’ practices. Across outcomes, racial disparities for African-American families were significant as were differences by geographic area. These results shifted the teams’ original ideas and led to the development of new intervention and implementation strategies. By using multiple types of data and multi-informant perspectives, and by processing these data with a collaborative planning team, six strategies were selected, and implementation initiated. Importantly, this storyboard highlights lessons learned that suggest that diverse perspectives and strong collaboration were needed to fully understand barriers and systemic factors, and to select strategies that have high potential to succeed in real-world child welfare and court settings.

Suggested Citation

Akin, B. A., Byers, K., Dunkerley, S., Clark, S. L., Wright, K., McArthur, V., Alford, D. (2021, May 3-6). Collaborative Teaming and Planning to Support the Selection of Innovations and Implementation Strategies. Global Implementation Conference 2021, Addressing Equity in Implementation: Building Research, Practice, and Policy Across the Globe, Denver, Colorado (Virtual Conference) (Refereed).