Project Overview. For over two decades, the John H. Chafee Foster Care Program for Successful Transition to Adulthood (Chafee program) has funded state and tribal programs that help youth transitioning out of foster care to achieve self-sufficiency. Since the creation of the Chafee program in 1999, the legislation has required that a small percentage of funding be set aside for rigorous evaluations of promising independent living programs. ACF has conducted a number of evaluation activities to meet this requirement, including the Multi-Site Evaluation of Foster Youth Programs, a rigorous, random assignment evaluation of four Chafee-funded programs. This previous evaluation work also found that, for many programs, traditional, large-scale impact evaluations were not feasible due to issues such as program size, lack of appropriate comparison groups, or implementation challenges.
To address these challenges, the Chafee SOTA project intends to:
- Develop innovative learning methods appropriate for programs serving youth transitioning out of foster care;
- Use innovative learning methods to study promising practices in Chafee-funded programs; and
- Strengthen the evidence base by improving the feasibility and rigor of evaluations.
Project Activities. Westat is leading the Chafee SOTA project in collaboration with its partners — the Kempe Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect (University of Colorado School of Medicine), Dr. Katie Richards-Schuster (University of Michigan, School of Social Work), and CLH Strategies & Solutions. In the first three years of the project, the Chafee SOTA evaluation team conducted the following activities:
- Engaged experts in child welfare system and program issues, evaluation methodology, and relevant specialized topics (e.g., education, employment, homelessness), with a focus on meaningful involvement of young adult partners with lived experience
- Conducted learning activities to identify information needs, evaluation challenges, and promising approaches used to address challenges
- Conducted a landscape analysis of the regulations, policies, and practices that states use to communicate to youth and young adults about access to the services and resources they may be eligible to receive
- Convened youth and young adults who have experienced foster care services to explore and define what access to services means and how it works in real life
- Developed a portfolio of innovative learning methods to use for improving the implementation of promising practices and programs and evaluating their effectiveness
- Identified and engaged youth-serving programs to participate in evaluation activities
OPRE and the Chafee SOTA evaluation team selected the four evaluation sites (PDF) after conducting comprehensive evaluability assessments with nine nominated programs across the country. The Chafee SOTA evaluation sites are: Great Expectations (Richmond, VA), Just in Time (San Diego, CA), My First Place (Oakland, CA), and Works Wonders (Providence, RI). Over the next two years, these four programs will partner with the Chafee SOTA team, led by Westat, to carry out evaluation activities using innovative learning methods tailored to each program’s service model and communicate relevant learnings to ACF and the field.
This contract was awarded to Westat in 2021. The OPRE point of contacts are Kelly Jedd McKenzie and Harmanpreet Bhatti.
Information collections related to this project have been reviewed and approved by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs under OMB #0970-0618. Related materials are available at the Chafee Strengthening Outcomes for Transition to Adulthood (Chafee SOTA) Project Overarching Generic page on RegInfo.gov .
The most currently approved documents are accessible by clicking on the ICR Ref. No. with the most recent conclusion date. To access the information collections (e.g., interviews, surveys, protocols), click on View Information Collection (IC) List. Click on View Supporting Statement and Other Documents to access other supplementary documents.