Project Description: Many child welfare agencies collaborate with people with lived experience (PwLE) to conduct better and safer research and evaluation. Is the approach comprehensive and authentic for each phase of the effort including funding, centered research questions, methodological design, dissemination, community learning, and practical use of results? Have other communities already built a replicable structure for that phase that can adapt for your jurisdiction? Using up-to date scans of practices around the country and through review of documents and informational interviews with informants, George will assess the local environment for co-designed research. The resulting assessment identifies strengths and challenges of each phase of the agency’s research, evaluation or CQI infrastructure, with step-by-step recommendations for solidifying what has been achieved and building up new resources.

George will conduct this project in partnership with existing PwLE partners or George can create new partnerships for the organization. Ideally, this project would be co-sponsored by the child welfare agency and a community partner but can also start with a single entity.

Project Impact: The assessment will describe opportunities to foster stronger community and agency partnership to better understand and build family wellbeing and child safety strategies. The assessment will offer transparency, accountability for future research, and opportunities for synergy among partners. Co-designed research and evaluation will amplify “nothing about us without us.”

Project Description: How will your agency support research or other local plans in your community? For example, Casey Family Programs, Annie E. Casey Foundation and W.T. Grant Foundation have built a national research agenda for the 21st Century. If your agency or organization has already developed a trusting transparent relationship with communities, then a conversation about research questions and methodology can ensue. When building a community research agenda or participating in a grant for multi-site evaluation, an agency, jurisdiction, and/or Tribe must jointly determine what they want to learn and how best to do it in partnership with each other. As an external third party, George can facilitate Liberating Structures or other approaches to building partnership and consensus on research priorities and plans for learning. If random control trials are a priority, he can support co-design by community for creating and writing conditions acceptable to all stakeholders. This project will produce a plan for learning and a research to-do list, crafted into a community agreement.

Project Impact: With the plan in place, as funding opportunity arise for local, federal, or private funding, then community expectations and guidance already established lead to successful and faster implementation.

Project Description: Many agencies do not have time nor resources to build their evaluative infrastructure needed to understand what is working and whether they are succeeding and where they can improve. For an organization, George can help the organization define goals, objectives, or build or review a program theory of change and/or logic model. George will collaborate closely and mentor organization staff, where requested, building the capacity of the organization to continue the better use of internal data. Exploring new variables and selecting meaningful measures for outputs and outcomes is a focal area this this project.

Project Impact: Organizations can better demonstrate their success to their stakeholders with targeted qualitative and quantitative data. Organizations can self-monitor gaps in reaching their targeted consumers and identify bottlenecks in their service delivery with good data infrastructure. Organizations can succeed with funders (foundations and government agencies) if they can present clear outputs and outcomes of their programs.

Project Description: Organizations and advocacy groups want to use the right data to support their missions and drive their next steps and solutions. But some sources of information can reflect the bias that the group is working to change systemically and in practice. Much of the available reported data does not include co-designed approaches. George can work with organization to assess the limitations of the available reported data. It is important that users of data be transparent about what is useful and what we as a field need to improve.

This project can be one-time or ongoing periodic consultation. Once George is familiar with your organization’s mission, goals, and activities, he can review specific data sources (datasets or research reports) to identify strengths and gaps regarding co-designed centered research data. The collaboration can be through brief issue documents, individual or group discussions, or larger group meetups or discussions.

Project Impact: Good data can lead to good conversations and better decisions among all stakeholders in a jurisdiction. If organizations document and share limitations and strengths of their data sources, the transparency can lead to shared development of better information. This effort will support the community’s priorities and demonstrate transparency in government and community documentation.

Project Description: The last ten years have led many organizations to find opportunity to survey and interview Persons with Lived Experience in the Child Welfare community. Have we begun to overburden some respondents with too many surveys and recreated a problem of underrepresenting groups of persons not accessible or not interested in telling their stories through public opinion? George, partnering with organizations and statistical experts, can develop plans for ongoing survey panels or social platforms to ensure that a broad voice is available to inform policy, practice, and development.

Project Impact: Providing ongoing consistent voice for families will build avenues for constructive growth and change in building community resource infrastructure.