SWRC Current Projects
Applied Research in Child Welfare
The Applied Research in Child Welfare Project is a 19-year collaboration between the Social Work Research Center in the School of Social Work at Colorado State University, the Colorado Department of Human Services, and the Departments of Human Services in Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder, Broomfield, Denver, Douglas, El Paso, Garfield, Jefferson, Larimer, and Pueblo counties. The purpose of the ARCH Project is to conduct applied research on child welfare interventions that informs social work practice and policy in Colorado and the United States.
Completed Reports (available upon request)
- ARCH Fatherhood Engagement Study (2022)
- ARCH Placement Stability Study (2022)
- Review of Literature on Supervised Visitation in the Child Welfare System (2021)
- Support Planning in Child Welfare: An Exploratory Study (2020)
- ARCH Caseworker Retention Survey Final Report (2018)
- An Evaluation of Youth Services Trends and Outcomes in Colorado – Final Report (2016)
- Adoption in Colorado’s Child Welfare System: A Study of Trends and Outcomes (2014)
- ARCH Comparison of Public and Private Foster Care in Colorado (2012)
- ARCH Predictors of Family Preservation Outcomes Study (2011)
- ARCH Core Services Replication Study (2010)
- Outcome Study of Out-of-Home Care in Colorado (2009)
- Descriptive Study of Out-of-Home Care in Colorado (2008)
- Core Services Outcome Study (2007)
- Juvenile Sexual Offender Treatment: A Systematic Review of Evidence-Based Research (2006)
- Child Welfare Outcomes in Colorado: A Matched Comparison between Children in Kinship and Foster Care (2006)
- Kinship Care in Colorado: A Descriptive Study of 12 Counties (2005)
- Kinship Care in the United States: A Systematic Review of Evidence-Based Research (2005)
Supported Families, Stronger Community
Supported Families, Stronger Community (SFSC) is a 5-year interagency effort led by the Larimer County (CO) Department of Human Services, supported by a Community Collaborations to Strengthen and Preserve Families grant offered by the Administration on Children, Youth, and Families (ACYF). The project features a family-level approach that relies on families as experts and utilizes a care coordination model designed to support families in the development and improvement of protective factors, increase support networks, and ensure access to needed services and supports.
As a coalition-based system, the SFSC project applies an innovative approach to previous and existing best practices by intentionally addressing existing service gaps and by expanding the child maltreatment prevention service array in Larimer County. Featuring a service navigation and case management approach, SFSC leverages the diverse strengths of the community to think differently about how to provide families with access to needed services and resources. Using a “no wrong door” approach which centers interagency collaboration, shared referral processes, data equity principles, and the Protective Factors framework, the initiative guides work to engage families through service alignment, resource sharing, and funding blending and braiding.
Community-based participatory research (CBPR) methods are prioritized in every aspect of the evaluation. The evaluation team maintains open communication with implementation partners, including the community navigators who bring lived expertise to their roles, to ensure programming is driven by family needs, not metrics. A CQI group of community partners helps the team co-create easily digestible data visualizations that are contextualized within broader initiative goals and accessible to a wide audience. This approach enables the SWRC evaluation team to interpret data in partnership with the community; retains an open process for new perspectives, questions, and challenges; and promotes increased power sharing among all stakeholders. Considerations brought forth by community partners have impacted significant aspects of the initiative’s implementation, including the decision to expand eligibility criteria from two Larimer County zip codes to all 28 Larimer County ZIP codes.
The SWRC evaluation team integrates a data equity lens to ensure the centering of community voices in the SFSC project. Specifically, members of the evaluation team work directly with the SFSC community navigators to identify, engage, and compensate individuals with lived expertise to partner on data collection, analysis, and knowledge translation. The evaluation team also collects and analyzes data to evaluate activities around racial equity, including developing a shared understanding of the root causes of inequalities in child welfare systems, restructuring policies and practices to incorporate racial equity, institutionalizing program strategies and evaluation activities to support systemic equity, and enhancing existing collaboratives with a focus on increasing community engagement around equity and improved access to prevention services.
The Social Work Research Center will conduct an outcome evaluation to compare FIT Court families and non-FIT Court families on time-in-care, permanency, child welfare re-involvement, and public health outcomes. SWRC will also design a cost-offset evaluation to compare FIT Court families and non-FIT Court families on actual service costs, case management costs, and county attorney costs.
Connecting Colorado
The goal of the Connecting Colorado (CC) Project is to improve responses to human trafficking of children/youth (HTCY), with a focus on coordination at a statewide level, and to create effective changes across systems. This project will meet this goal by building upon existing promising practices, experience, and expertise of local multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) into a statewide approach that aims to increase statewide identification of children/youth experiencing human trafficking and to connect them with culturally appropriate and trauma-responsive services. The project is implemented by the Colorado Department of Public Safety (CDPS) Division of Criminal Justice (DCJ) and funded by a grant award from the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), Office for Victims of Crime (OVC).
SWRC will evaluate this project by conducting a strengths and gaps analysis of existing MDTs, assessing the implementation of a statewide toolkit, conducting a utility study of a commonly used human trafficking screening tool, assessing workshops and trainings, and analyzing performance measures. Additionally, the evaluation team will look at outcomes by regularly reporting on human trafficking incidence data.
Denver Anti-Trafficking Alliance
The Denver District Attorney’s Office (DDA) and the Asian Pacific Development Center (APDC) are collaborating to enhance the structure of the existing Denver Anti-Trafficking Alliance (DATA)/Enhanced Collaborative Model (ECM) Task Force and expand its capabilities to implement victim-centered, coordinated approaches to identifying victims of human trafficking, investigate and prosecute sex and labor trafficking cases, and address the individualized needs of victims through service provision in the Metro Denver area. These enhancements will result in long-term systems change, an increase in comprehensive services for victims of human trafficking, and ultimately the reduction and prevention of human trafficking.
SWRC will evaluate efforts to expand the Task Force, increase prosecutions, and strengthen service provision to survivors of human trafficking. Using law enforcement and victim services data, SWRC will highlight overall and subgroup trends over time. The evaluation will assess training reach and participation with the goal of increasing awareness of human trafficking among law enforcement, service providers, and community agencies in Metro Denver. SWRC will also conduct a community assessment of Task Force membership to identify which sectors and organizations are missing from membership, with the goal of conducting outreach to and recruiting a diverse array of stakeholders to participate in Task Force activities and, ultimately, contribute to their mission of awareness-raising, investigation and prosecution, and service provision. In addition, the evaluation will explore Task Force effectiveness via Task Force practices and policies, resource sharing, cross-referrals, and perceptions of flexibility, trust, and collaboration among members.
Kinship Navigator/Colorado Kinnected
Colorado Kinnected expands the scope of services offered to kinship families through the Title IV-E Waiver Demonstration Project Kinship Supports Intervention. Through the Waiver, CDHS offered county departments of human services the opportunity to trade guaranteed federal foster care maintenance and administration reimbursement for up-front funding to implement one or more of five Waiver interventions. The Colorado Kinnected program builds on the synergy between the two interventions by more formally integrating kinship caregivers into child welfare case services and goals through facilitated family engagement meetings. The program also strengthens the kinship supports intervention through increased face-to-face meetings and ongoing contacts with kinship caregivers, increased assessment of caregiver needs, and the addition of family search and engagement activities to build robust support networks around kinship families.
A randomized controlled trial was conducted to examine the impact of the Colorado Kinnected kinship navigator program on kinship placement outcomes for children and youth with an open child welfare case in seven Colorado Counties. Child welfare staff in each county department of human services provided Colorado Kinnected program services to kinship families allocated to the intervention group and kinship supports as usual to kinship families allocated to the control group. The results indicated that the Colorado Kinnected kinship navigator program promotes reunification with parents and prevents step-ups to non-relative foster care among children and youth in child welfare kinship placements. The study was submitted and approved by the Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) Clearinghouse and received a “promising” rating for Colorado Kinnected.
SafeCare Colorado
Prevention of child maltreatment requires the implementation of evidence-based practices at community- and system levels. SafeCare© is an evidence-based program implemented in Colorado as part of statewide child maltreatment prevention efforts. The SafeCare Colorado (SCC) program is administered by the Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS) Office of Early Childhood (OEC). The Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect (Kempe) serves as the state intermediary. The program is supported by the National SafeCare Training and Research Center (NSTRC) at Georgia State University (GSU). NSTRC, in collaboration with Kempe and the OEC, oversees implementation and fidelity for this manualized, structured home visiting program.
The Social Work Research Center has served as the independent evaluator since 2013. At present, SWRC continues to conduct a descriptive evaluation to assess implementation activities, proximal impacts, and participant populations reached for families served by SCC each state fiscal year. Additionally, SWRC is partnering with RTI International to conduct a feasibility study to pilot study procedures and build capacity for a larger quasi-experimental study focused on family well-being. This larger quasi-experimental design, to be conducted in subsequent years of the evaluation, aims to rigorously evaluate the program’s effectiveness at improving outcomes in four broad domains: child well-being, adult well-being, parenting practices, and protective factors.
Larimer County Adult and Aging Services Evaluation
The Larimer County Office on Aging, which is located in the Larimer County Department of Human Services (LCDHS), is the Area Agency on Aging (AAA) for Larimer County. As one of sixteen AAAs in Colorado, the Office on Aging receives funding from the Federal Older Americans Act and the Older Coloradans Fund to provide services to Larimer County residents who are 60 and older and to serve as the lead agency for planning and coordinating those services. Included in the Office on Aging service area are the communities of Berthoud, Estes Park, Fort Collins, LaPorte, Loveland, and Wellington, as well as the rural areas of the county.
Area Agencies on Aging (AAA), as mandated under the Older Americans Act, play a unique role in not only funding community partners and providing direct services but to innovate, advocate, and lead our community to meet the growing needs of the population. AAAs need to be visible, innovative, collaborative, and responsive to community needs. The Office on Aging provides funding to agencies that provide services for seniors in Larimer County, including congregate meals, transportation, legal assistance, caregiver support, and many more. These agencies are referred to as our funded community partners. In addition, the Office on Aging staff provides direct services and programs to older adults.
The Social Work Research Center is conducting a strengths and needs assessment for the Office on Aging. The evaluation will be guided by principles of data equity and community-based participatory research (CBPR). The guiding goal of CBPR is not to inform community partners of research and practice goals, but rather to engage community partners as decision-makers at all key steps of the research process.
Collaborative Management Program (CMP)
In 2004, the Colorado General Assembly passed House Bill 04-1451 (referred to as HB 1451) to establish collaborative management programs at the county level that would improve outcomes for children, youth, and families involved with multiple agencies. Research has demonstrated that interagency collaboration yields important benefits including increased probability of improvement in child, youth, and family outcomes; maximization of available resources for the provision of services; increased coordination within and among service delivery systems; and shared responsibility across systems and service providers.
The Division of Child Welfare in the Office of Children, Youth, and Families at the Colorado Department of Human Services contracted with the Social Work Research Center in the School of Social Work at Colorado State University and RTI International to serve as the evaluation team to conduct the evaluation of the Collaborative Management Program in Colorado. Collectively, the results of the process, outcome, and cost evaluations provide an understanding of CMP and enable the evaluation team to answer the identified evaluation questions. Each component also addresses other relevant evaluation questions to explore how CMP is implemented at the county level and to better understand the contextual and practice factors contributing to child/youth and system outcomes.
Core Services
The Core Services Program was established within the Colorado Department of Human Services (CDHS) in 1994 and is statutorily required to provide strength-based resources and support to families when children/youth are at imminent risk of out-of-home placement, in need of services to return home, or to maintain a placement in the least restrictive setting possible. The Core Services Program is based on a foundation of research and practice in family preservation. Family preservation services are generally short-term services designed to support families in crisis by improving parenting and family functioning while keeping children/youth safe. Family preservation services grew out of the recognition that children/youth need a safe and stable family and that separating children/youth from their families and communities removes them from natural supports and often causes trauma, leaving lasting negative effects. Responding to the complexity and variability in the needs of children, youth, and families, the Core Services Program allows for individualized services to meet the needs of diverse Colorado communities.
Colorado Revised Statute (C.R.S.) 26-5.5-104(6) authorizing the Core Services Program mandates that the Department annually provide “an evaluation of the overall effectiveness and cost-efficiency of the program and any recommended changes to such program.” The Core Services Program Evaluation, produced by the Social Work Research Center at Colorado State University (CSU), responds to this mandate and is designed to describe the outcomes and costs of the program across the state in order to provide meaningful data to support decisions made by the Office of Children, Youth, and Families, Division of Child Welfare (DCW), and county Core Services programs.
Project JUSTIS
The CSU Trauma & Resilience Assessment Center (CTRAC) and The Social Work Research Center (Center) received a four-year SAMHSA grant for the Juvenile Justice Trauma Informed Systems Program (Project JUSTIS). Project JUSTIS is intended to serve youth with trauma histories that are currently involved in, previously been involved in, or at risk for involvement in, the juvenile justice (JJ) system in Larimer County. Extant research is clear that (1) youth who have experienced trauma are at higher risk than their peers for engaging in behaviors that could lead to involvement in JJ, (2) youth involved in the juvenile justice system (JJ) have experienced higher rates of trauma in their past than their peers, and (3) youth who are detained and/or incarcerated are at higher risk for experiencing new or additional traumas during detainment. For these reasons, Project JUSTIS hopes to learn what prevention and intervention strategies are most effective in addressing trauma-related symptoms, as well as engagement in high-risk and/or illegal behaviors that could lead to first-time (or additional) involvement in the JJ system. Lastly, Project JUSTIS is invested in supporting community partners in their ability to assess, recognize, and support youth impacted by trauma; to this end, we hope to assess the efficacy of our training efforts with these community partners. There are three primary components of Project JUSTIS, each with their own goals: Clinical, Training, and Research/Evaluation. The research will examine the following topics:
(1) Rates of trauma and trauma-related symptoms in our population;
(2) Relation between trauma exposure and juvenile justice involvement and/or risk;
(3) Relation between trauma exposure and youth, caregiver, and family functioning;
(4) Changes in youth, caregiver, and/or family symptoms and well-being from the start to the end of engagement in clinical activities;
(5) Moderators and/or mediators that impact treatment success;
(6) Changes in knowledge and/or behavior in training participants;
(7) Moderators and/or mediators that impact training success