Frankie is 14 years old and lives with his sister, brothers, and moms. He and his sister were adopted when they were 2 years old and 4 years old, respectively. He loves spending time with his aunts, uncles, and cousins and loves being part of a big family.

Learn about negotiating boundaries, communication, support, and normalcy from a young person formally in foster care and her adoptive parents.

Buzzwords: Moving to Behavioral Descriptors doodle video is a short, animated video that follows a child involved in a child welfare investigation. The video describes what buzzwords are and illustrates the impact they can have on children and families. It also demonstrates how to recognize buzzwords and offers strategies for transforming buzzwords into objective, behavior-based descriptors.

This publication looks at buzzwords in the context of words or phrases commonly used in child welfare reporting and documentation that can be subjective or carry negative connotations, and offers strategies to minimize their negative impact.

This tool is a role-playing activity, designed to help child welfare workers and supervisors become more familiar with the process of recognizing and translating buzzwords into descriptive language.

Hear a first-hand account of a kinship and adoptive mother raising her nephew, fulfilling roles as both aunt and primary caregiver.

Hear about the challenges and successes and how Donaniece is teaching her grandson the meaning of family.

Shares Molene’s story about becoming the primary caregiver for her four nieces, raising them, adopting them, negotiating the child welfare system, and creating a family.

Bruce and Brenda have been married for 33 years and have four daughters. From 2006 to 2009, they provided a kinship placement for their four grandchildren. In 2010, the couple adopted Bruce (now 18 years old), Tre’Nae (now 15 years old), Mason (now 13 years old), and Kiaunna (now 10 years old).

Explores the tasks of identifying fidelity measures from other sources or developing new ones, developing the tools and protocols, and then using data to make improvements.

Explores the tasks of determining the “big picture” objectives and scope of evaluation efforts and assessing the agency’s capacity to conduct rigorous fidelity assessments, formative evaluations, or summative evaluations.

Describes the task of analyzing costs to satisfy funding requirements; support decision-making around intervention selection, testing, and piloting; and plan for scaling up and sustainability.

Presents how teams can develop a visual logic model that shows inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes needed for the evaluation plan in a structured format to guide the work.

Examines the tasks of sharing findings and recommendations to inform stakeholders of the implementation progress, guide decision-making about the future of the intervention, support advocating for resources, and expand the knowledge base.

Examines how teams can identify questions to help guide monitoring and evaluation, shape the data that are collected and analyzed, and support evaluation partners in developing research questions.