Active engagement of individuals, groups, and communities is crucial in ensuring that evaluations are equitable, culturally responsive and reflective of the diverse perspectives and experiences of those invested in the outcomes.
The Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation (OPRE) strives to make our work rigorous, relevant, transparent, independent, and ethical. These five principles form the ACF Evaluation Policy and guide everything we do. Incorporating the voices of individuals with lived experience into all phases of research and evaluation efforts can strengthen the rigor of the evaluation activities and improve the understanding, acceptance, and use of findings. It also empowers those individuals to shape the programs that serve their communities, fostering more empathetic and equitable human services approaches.
As we look back on 2023, we’re reflecting not only on what we’ve done, but at how we’ve done it. This year, we continued our work building evidence with a range of partners including ACF program offices, state agencies, local communities, and individuals with lived experience who work with, participate in, and benefit from ACF programs. Explore a selection of 2023 accomplishments from across our portfolio of research and data topics:
Welfare, Self Sufficiency and Child Support
In 2023, OPRE released the Welfare and Family Self-Sufficiency Learning Agenda, developed jointly with ACF’s Office of Family Assistance. This learning agenda is a critical tool in our offices’ work to advance knowledge about effectively fostering family economic security, stability and self-sufficiency.
We also convened a community advisory board through our Advancing Contextual Analysis and Methods of Participant Engagement (CAMPE) project, so those with lived experience can inform our work related to TANF and other human services programs going forward.
We released a toolkit to help TANF and child support programs engage families as they work to improve their services. The toolkit was developed in partnership with TANF and child support staff and people served by TANF programs.
Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood
Our Race Equity for Fatherhood, Relationship, and Marriage Programs to Empower Black Families (REFRAME) project is engaging with researchers, practitioners, and Black community members to develop resources for racial equity in healthy marriage and fatherhood programs. Addressing these questions will allow ACF to better serve Black families in HMRF programs and support the Administration’s priority to promote race equity.
Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention
This year, our Personal Responsibility Education Program: Promising Youth Programs (PREP PYP) project released an online pregnancy prevention curriculum for youth in foster care, adapted from an in-person curriculum through partnership with federal partners, researchers, parents and young adults.
Indigenous Communities
We were excited to publish the Cross-Cultural Understanding and Cultural Humility resources for training researchers working with American Indian and Alaskan Native (AIAN) communities. The resources were developed through close collaboration with researchers, practitioners and government staff, including Native voices and honoring diverse AIAN communities.
This fall, OPRE shared our Research and Evaluation with Indigenous Communities webpage. It collates our research and resources co-created with Indigenous community members. Our recent blog post, Recognizing Native American Heritage, shares more about the story of this work.
Through our Evidence Capacity Support project, in 2023 we partnered with ACF’s Administration for Native Americans to gather evidence to make their grantmaking more equitable for organizations with varying capacity. This work engaged the community organizations themselves in the process to achieve this goal.
Human Trafficking
In November OPRE released a toolkit for economic empowerment programs for people who experienced human trafficking. It was developed through listening and community reflection sessions with program providers and participants.
Artificial Intelligence
Accessible and highly advanced artificial intelligence tools like generative AI are greatly expanding the possibilities for data and data use. In 2023, OPRE and the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation released a report on the opportunities and challenges with the responsible use of AI. We are collaborating with other ACF and HHS offices to build capacity and promote the responsible use of AI in the human services.
Resources for Program Evaluation
This year we released the third edition of our Program Manager’s Guide to Evaluation, designed to help strengthen human services program managers’ understanding of and readiness for program evaluation. This guide explains what program evaluation is, its importance, and different steps in the evaluation process, including how to engage an evaluation team, prepare for and design an evaluation, gather credible evidence, analyze data, and share lessons learned. The updated Guide now includes a "Practice Culturally Responsive and Equitable Evaluation" section in each chapter that promotes culturally responsive and equitable engagement.
Our Commitment to Community Engagement Continues
In 2024 we’ll continue to build evidence to improve the lives of children and families by harnessing the power of active engagement and participatory research. We’re excited for new projects that will build evidence by actively partnering with and engaging individuals, groups and communities, such as our Advancing Race Equity for Black Youth in Adolescent Pregnancy Prevention Programming and TANF Data Collaborative 2.0 projects. As always, we remain committed to the five principles of the ACF Evaluation Policy: Rigor, Relevance, Transparency, Independence and Ethics, all of which are situated on a foundation of equity.
We look forward to continuing to partner with you on this important work. Until then, best wishes for a safe, healthy and happy 2024!