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Ryan & Policy experts detail rationale for “Connect2Impact” Clearinghouse & evidence-based child welfare programming

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By: AIF Staff

The American Idea Foundation, in consultation with Stand Together, the Sorenson Impact Center, and Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities, worked together to create a user-designed clearinghouse that enables caseworkers to identify evidence-based programs and refer children and families to them. 

The clearinghouse, Connect2Impact, was born from a desire to help social service providers identify evidence-based programs more easily. It was designed to fill an information gap that exists in the poverty-fighting space between end-users and those recommending programs and researchers who have evaluated these strategies. In short, it is all too difficult for harried caseworkers or parents to identify programs that truly work, so the clearinghouse aims to centralize this information with an emphasis on evidence and data. 

The federal government has attempted to address this information gap before. It passed the Families First Prevention Services Act which required a new clearinghouse to show which poverty-fighting programs work and which do not. The federal government has also required other clearinghouses — for education, for welfare programs, for job-training programs – but they are rarely utilized by people on the ground. 

Connect2Impact serves to make information about evidence-based programs and strategies available to individuals and families. It started first with child and family welfare programs and plans to broaden the scope of searchable programs going forward.  

The decision to start with child and family welfare programs was made because of the profound effects the COVID-19 pandemic will undoubtedly have on our nation’s youth. A year of isolation, a prolonged disruption of regular routines, and a lengthy removal from in-person schooling is expected to negatively impact all children. Those children at-risk of entering into foster care are even more vulnerable. 

In April 2022, Speaker Ryan convened and moderated a conversation about the thinking behind the Connect2Impact clearinghouse and the importance of promoting evidence-based strategies that make tangible differences in the lives of children. Ryan was joined in conversation by: 

  • Sara Peters, Vice President of Impact and Evaluation, Stand Together Foundation
  • Brendan Perry, Project Design Manager, Wilson Sheehan Lab for Economic Opportunities
  • Lilly Myers, Impact Strategy at Sorenson Impact Center

Excerpts from the policy panel, which have been edited lightly for clarity, follow. Video of the panel discussion can be accessed HERE

Sara Peters on the rationale behind the user-designed Connect2Impact clearinghouse

“Two weeks into COVID-19, I was leading a portfolio practice group and I was talking to a number of non-profit executive directors who were facing the reality of reduced budgets and an increase in program sign-ups. They were dealing with a lot of the sign-ups that they weren’t predicting — people who are anticipating getting laid off or people who were worried and on the precipice of poverty. These people were increasing the needed dosage of programming and they wanted families to receive it but program directors didn’t think they were ideally prepared to serve all of those new clients.

 “I started to have some conversations about why isn’t there a clearinghouse that is client-focused and customer-focused, where you have some predictive algorithms where we can load some information from randomized control trials and external validations and some other programmatic characteristics? It would be a clearinghouse where users can self-select the characteristics that matter and over time, we can have a recommendation engine that program directors and program leaders and families can use when looking for services.” 

Brendan Perry on the Literature Review that informed Connect2Impact’s approach

“What we learned was that while there are a lot of studies out there and a lot of research has been done on child welfare programs, around 500 studies that we found, there are really far too few studies that are conducting rigorous research with large enough sample sizes where you’re able to get a really clear result. 

“And so, after we went through all of these, there are maybe only 20 or so studies that met our highest level of rigor and the highest level of a sample size. This really leads to a landscape where there is less causal evidence on the effectiveness of programs, which is less than ideal for such an important issue. Broadly, I would say we learned that there’s a need for more rigorous, large-scale studies on child welfare programs that not only improve our understanding of what works, but also for whom they have worked.” 

Lily Myers on working with Utah-based providers to make Connect2Impact relevant:

“After the initial pilot program, a beta-version of the website was created and seeded with programs that were evidence-based and local to Salt Lake County. We were able to sit down with supervisors and practitioners from the Utah Department of Child and Family Services to have them actually use the website, walk them through the features, and get their feedback on what was useful and what they wanted to see from it. 

“Overall, the response was incredibly positive. They were very excited about this kind of tool. A lot of times, the way that they find programs for their clients is word of mouth or something even as rudimentary as Googling to find what’s local to them. So, the opportunity to have a tool that combines what programs are actually local to their area that they can feasibly recommend for their clients and what the evidence is behind them, that was very valuable to those practitioners….”

“It was a big endeavor to just map out and characterize the programs offered to children and families within Salt Lake County. But from there, we’ve discussed opening it up to Utah as a whole and characterizing all of the state’s programs. I think it would be tremendously useful and impactful moving into other states and even starting just with larger cities.”

Ryan on the government’s lagging behind in developing data-driven child welfare strategies

“Until recently, policymakers have ignored the child welfare space. The recent passage of the Families First Prevention Services Act was the first major reform to this area going back to the early 1980s. This isn’t for a lack of problems that the system has been experiencing – far too many children were taken out of their homes too quickly, while other children were left languishing in really difficult situations. We just weren’t getting it right. 

“Thankfully, there are a number of hard-working individuals in this space who are working to provide permanent safe homes to children. And even more importantly, we are working to prevent the need for youth to enter the foster care system in the first place. The creation of a searchable and accessible website for caseworkers and for other people who refer children and families to the child welfare space seemed necessary and that’s why we created Connect2Impact.”  

Perry: Expanding usage of evidence-based programs requires more research and greater dissemination

“One part of it is getting research and one part is getting the study results into the hands of practitioners. I think the Connect2Impact tool is going to be really vital in bridging that gap. And as you said, I think it also revealed to us that there are some important research questions that aren’t adequately addressed in the existing literature. One of which might just be what the effects of these programs are on some of the long-term outcomes. 

“It’s great to know what the effect of program X is on reunification or days in foster care. But it would be even more helpful to know what the effect of program X is on high school completion, college completion, interactions with the criminal justice system, and earnings down the road, and to understand the long-term impact of these programs….”

“In terms of what researchers should be doing to make evidence more usable, obviously, academic papers are a big part of what researchers do and they’re important to validate results but we need to stop thinking about academic papers as an end-product in any way. If a paper that’s evaluating your program is published and then it just sits on the shelf of another academic, it’s really not doing what it’s supposed to be doing and that is to inform the end users, the case managers who are sitting there with clients and policymakers who are making decisions. 

“There is some onus on researchers and I know that we feel this a lot, but we have to take academic results and then package them and disseminate them in a way that can be used by the audiences that really need the information. I think this tool will go a long way in bridging that gap but there’s certainly a need for more work to be done on this and the creation of evidence and how evidence is disseminated to these different groups.”

Sara Peters on how evidence matters, but simple factors may matter more to end-users: 

“From my discussions with practitioners, [the value of evidence] varied a lot based on their ability or frequency of using evidence in the behind-the-scenes decision-making of the programs that they use. From the evidence standpoint… it’s not as cut and dry as is there evidence or isn’t there evidence. All of these trials and studies have some kind of limitations and how applicable they are on certain sample populations. 

“So, we realized the big thing that practitioners are looking at and do care about is the sample population and the groups that this research was done on and that ended up being a strong piece of information that workers on the ground want to see and want to be able to assess for themselves.”

Brendan Perry on how Notre Dame’s Lab for Economic Opportunities helps non-profits utilize data 

“It’s definitely a long and exciting process sometimes, but really, it’s all about finding those innovators who are on the ground, who are doing something that they believe is moving the needle on poverty. It’s about those groups that are having a positive impact and showing these organizations the basics and the importance of doing impact evaluations.

“And then from there, our goal is really walking hand-in-hand with them to see how we can overlay a research design that’s going to be minimally impactful to their everyday work because we know that doing research is just another thing on their plate sometimes. We want to take as much of the burden from them as possible so that we can design a rigorous study in the least invasive way. 

“Once we get it up and running, we work with them to understand the results and that brings us to how we disseminate results. One thing that we’ve begun to do as a way of sort of increasing dissemination is to build engagement plans with our partners about how to use results – whether those results are positive, negative or neutral – so that we can communicate to their internal teams what the results were, what they mean, and then communicate with other providers in the same space to put on different webinars, to have connections to funders, to help make connections to the media, connections to local policymakers, and be able to promote the result in a way that’s going to improve programming for their current clients and their future clients…. 

“Then finally, a big part of using evidence is replication so when we find those all-star, rock-star programs, it’s about making sure that we can package those programs and describe them in a way that makes them easy to scale and replicate in other places.”

This panel discussion on child welfare was part of a quarterly series of policy conversations hosted by the American Idea Foundation to draw attention to evidence-based policies aimed at expanding economic opportunities. Past policy conversations have focused on building a 21st century workforce, reforming the Earned Income Tax Credit, reducing recidivism and promoting 2nd chances, and properly implementing Opportunity Zones.  

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Reauthorizing MIECHV & Recognizing Evidence-Based Successes in Fighting Poverty

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By: AIF Staff

The American Idea Foundation has long believed that Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting (MIECHV) Program provides a useful example of how the government can move towards evidence-based programming and better allocate resources to more effectively fight poverty. As this home-visitation program is considered for reauthorization by Congress later this year, the American Idea Foundation will push lawmakers to reward MIECHV’s data-driven approach and understand the impact it is having in communities across the country.

MIECHV is a time-intensive, customized approach to helping parents from before their child’s birth through the first years of the child’s life. The First Five Years Fund summarized the program’s approach well, stating:

“Evidence-based home visiting programs, like those made possible by MIECHV, pair families with limited support and resources with trained home visitors such as nurses, social workers, and educators. Home visitors meet with families at home and work with families from pregnancy through their child’s kindergarten entry to help lay the foundation for the health, education, development, and economic self-sufficiency of the entire family. Visits by caring, experienced professionals can turn good intentions into good parenting, breaking generations-long cycles of poverty, addiction, abuse, and despair.”

MIECHV is administered by the federal government through grants to states, territories, and tribes allowing these entities to create voluntary programs, backed by data and evidence, to help families and parents build happy and healthy homes for children. It is results-based and has been subject to more rigorous evaluations than any other single poverty-fighting program.

At a recent hearing held by the House Ways and Means Committee, Congresswoman Jackie Walorski of Indiana highlighted the program’s success – and the reasons for it, saying in part:

“MIECHV is a program that gets results. This program builds upon decades of research that proves home visits by a nurse, social worker, or other trained professional during pregnancy and in the first years of a child’s life help prevent child abuse and neglect, support positive parenting, improve maternal and child health, and promote child development and school readiness….

“The program is now up for reauthorization again this year. What makes MIECHV unique is that funding is tied to evidence. Most federal programs operate in a black box. Less than $1 out of every $100 the government spends is backed by even the most basic evidence that the money is being spent wisely. Unlike most federal social welfare programs, we know what outcomes taxpayers can expect from our investments in MIECHV. This program serves as a model for how other programs for low-income families should be funded.

“For a home visiting model to earn taxpayer support, an evaluation must prove the program has demonstrated significant, positive outcomes such as preventing child abuse and neglect, improving maternal and child health, and improving economic independence…. As we turn to reauthorization, Republican priorities include providing a full 5-year reauthorization to give states and implementing organizations the certainty they need to conduct long-term planning.

“We aim to raise awareness of MIECHV’s high-quality outcomes to promote this time-tested program. And, we must apply lessons learned during the pandemic, specifically from the success of remote visits that grew efficiency while preserving the positive outcomes we expect from this evidence-based model.

“Few federal social programs have been evaluated to determine if they are working, and almost none have conditioned funding on evidence of effectiveness. When we spend limited taxpayer dollars to help those in need, we must ensure we’re investing in programs that deliver results.”

Without question, MIECHV is a bipartisan success story, supported by the administrations of Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden. Most recently, the Biden Administration announced millions in grants via the American Rescue Plan. There was a tremendous amount wrong with the American Rescue Plan, but funding MIECHV at more robust levels was right.

The evidence of MIECHV’s positive impact on children and families has been well-documented and the American Idea Foundation’s visit to a South Carolina Nurse Family Partnership program provided a visual testament to the difference its making in people’s lives.  

To learn more about the program’s impact, watch: Lessons from the Front Lines of South Carolina.

The American Idea Foundation believes that the condition of your birth should not determine the outcome of your life, and the MIECHV program provides a worthwhile example of how the federal government, working in tandem with researchers and organizations at the state and local level, can ensure that all children have the opportunity to succeed and lead productive lives. It is an approach that should be replicated as leaders work to meet other pressing policy challenges.   

On “Hardly Working” podcast, Ryan discusses why evidence-based policymaking is essential to fight poverty effectively

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By: AIF Staff

Washington, DC – Earlier this week, American Idea Foundation President Paul Ryan was a featured guest on theHardly Working podcast. The podcast, hosted by Brent Orrell and produced by the American Enterprise Institute (where Ryan is a visiting fellow), focuses on the future of workforce development and on how policymakers can help individuals meet the diverse needs of the 21st century economy.

During the podcast interview, Speaker Ryan and Orrell discussed using evidence-based solutions to break through partisan gridlock, the amazing accomplishments of the Nurse-Family Partnership program, and other ways to successfully fight poverty.

Listen to the entire interview here or by clicking the icon below. Highlights of the conversation, edited slightly for clarity, follow.

The genesis & aims of the American Idea Foundation:

“After I retired as Speaker of the House, I wanted to focus on some of the things I really cared about which are poverty and strategies to improve our fight against poverty. I wanted to help go after poverty’s root causes and help break the cycle of poverty. There are different kinds of poverty, but I wanted to focus on intergenerational poverty and it’s just a perfect segue to what we are talking about which is the last law I wrote in Congress. It’s this thing called the Evidence Act.

“It’s a bill that I did with Senator Patty Murray. We founded this [Evidence-Based Policymaking] Commission and we got the idea from Jim Sullivan at Notre Dame, economists at their Laboratory for Economic Opportunities, and Raj Chetty, an economist at Harvard…. We put Ron Haskins from the Brookings Institution in charge of it because I wanted to make sure this was not seen as some Republican thing, but rather just a good thing. The Commission gave us its results, we took them and put them in a bill and got it through Congress….

“Now, academic researchers can look at the data and see what works and what doesn’t and then get the government to actually measure the results of programs, the effectiveness of programs, and whether something works or not.  [It helps] get the muscle memory built in the minds not just of the bureaucracy, but of policymakers and of philanthropy to focus on evidence-based policymaking, so that we can bypass the ideological loggerheads….

“So, my foundation is basically focused on what I would call center-right ideas for fighting poverty and restoring civil society and reproducing upper mobility that we aspire to as Americans. It’s called the American Idea Foundation and I’d say the “American Idea,” or at least what we think of, is that the condition of your birth should not determine the outcome of your life.

“America is the only country founded on natural rights. It’s a beautiful thing. We are the only country that’s founded on an idea and it’s the job of Americans to pass this on to every generation.

“My foundation is trying to do that by making sure that we’re [using] evidence as a policy-making barometer and as a tool in government and out of government. Then [we’re trying to support] those things that connect the private sector, the public sector, and the philanthropic sector to get capital into poor communities, to get the private sector into poor communities.”

An evidence-based success story: The Nurse-Family Partnership program

“I’ve been to the Nurse-Family Partnership programs in Kenosha and Racine and I was just down in rural South Carolina last month touring [their program]…. The Nurse-Family Partnership is where a nurse partners with an expectant mom and they become very close. They become friends and the nurse effectively acts like a mother or a mentor – that’s probably a better word, a mentor to the expectant mother to help her figure out what you have to do to have a healthy pregnancy. The nurse says these are the vitamins, this the diet, these are the things you don’t do, these are the things you do, and here’s how you get prepared. No one else would tell [these mothers] this and then after they’ve had the baby, they help them for [two] years… with all those other things in infancy and it has huge impacts on a child’s development.

“The program has been subjected to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and we’ve been running evidence and analytics on this program for years. I first got involved with it in the George W. Bush Administration which grew the program. President Obama was enamored with it and they expanded it and then President Trump saw it and he reauthorized it. So, it grew under Bush, Obama, and Trump, three very different Presidents.

“It’s a program that just has really good evidence that proved [its concept]. It’s teaching women who are having babies…. how to be good moms and how to raise those kids and how to do so at a really critical stage of development from pre-birth to three years old.

“It’s extremely successful. Those nurses and those moms become extremely close, and they help these moms really ratchet themselves up the ladder of life, up the escalator of upward mobility, and get them on a really good path, putting their life together so the mother is better off. And if she’s going to be better off, we all know and it’s really clear that her child is going to be better off.

“This is an example of a government program and of civil society working to actually alter people’s trajectory and change society for the better…. For moms who’ve never had a baby and who didn’t know how to raise a baby, there is a good program that actually works. And if we prove that it works, then let’s fund it and let’s take the money from the programs that have been proven not to work and use that so we don’t actually net increase spending.”

Focusing on outcomes, not dollars spent, to better fight poverty:

“For lack of a better phrase, the War on Poverty got gripped by an ideology and because of that ideology, we started to measure success by throwing money at problems. We measured success by inputs like money or creating new programs.

“In many ways, they created this notion of “just let the government do it” if we’re trying to fight poverty and trying to get people out of poverty. [It was a notion of] don’t worry, pay your taxes, the government has got this figured out. [The government] will create programs to deal with this, as if that is a perfectly decent substitute for communities, for mediating institutions, for people helping fix problems person to person or community to community. They decided big is better. [They decided] the federal government is more efficient and they can just design programs and therefore materialistically [the government] can solve this problem.

“It blew up in our faces. It created a lot of dependency and it backfired. Materially taking people out of poverty, from a technical perspective by throwing money at the problem – sure, you can do that — but have we really created a society enriched with upward mobility, with people living the best versions of their lives and becoming the best versions of themselves? Did these policies do that? No.

“I think what is missing is the sense of community, the sense of solidarity, the mediating institutions that civil society provides. We displaced people participating in helping the lives of one another…. You can’t just substitute [government] for the private sector and for economic growth, wage growth, competition for labor, innovation, opportunity, social capital and all that comes with it.

“I think we went down this path in the War on Poverty of just getting rid of the secret sauce that makes all this stuff work and substituting all of it for more programs, more money, more dependency and [we’ve seen] predictable results.”

Strengthening civil society in an era of digitization and polarization:

“We are in real trouble right now because of digitization. I think we are living more artificial lives on our electronic devices and it is actually bringing atrophy to these mediating institutions — our churches, our civic organizations, the place and space where we live our lives, the space between our government and ourselves.

“And there’s also capital. Obviously, you have to have investment. You have to have organizations that promote civil society and all these things that help people realize their humanity and that work with one another to do that….

“The best thing I can come up with is we have to revitalize those institutions and revitalize civil society. We have to revitalize those non-government organizations and, since we’re becoming less religious as well, it is these non-government organizations that connect us and give us a sense of value and pride in helping other people. They give us this common good sense of community. If you’re raising kids — and I’ve got two that still have to get through high school, you’re really involved in this stuff but once you’re done with that, everybody leaves and that’s what’s sort of happening in society today.

“I wish I could say there’s a government program or a bill with the capacity to fix this but there really isn’t a way other than to have a good, healthy, growing economy so people have discretionary income, so they have more hours at home, working on these parts of their community.”

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