Lessons Learned When Building the Evidence for a Child Welfare Practice Model.

The purpose of this brief is to highlight for the child welfare field the evidence-building lessons learned from the evaluation of Success Coach, a post-reunification program developed by Catawba County, North Carolina. This evidence building began in 2013 with an evaluation of the Success Coach program’s process and preliminary outcomes. Child Trends collaborated on a series of briefs highlighting lessons learned from this initial work, and then designed a more rigorous outcome and implementation evaluation of the program. In this brief we describe the background and development of Success Coach and discuss learnings from the earlier process and outcome evaluation as they relate to building the evidence for Success Coach. In more detail, we describe the design of the outcome evaluation and present preliminary findings from this second study. We also discuss implications for other jurisdictions wanting to implement and evaluate post-reunification services similar to Success Coach. (Author introduction modified)