Brief: Supporting Families Through Coordinated Services Partnerships

Publication Date: March 11, 2022
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  • Published: 2022

Introduction

Research Questions

  1. Are coordinated services approaches able to coordinate partnerships and service application and delivery? Can we identify key characteristics of these approaches?
  2. Are coordinated services approaches that combine ECE, family economic security, and/or other health and human services able to address other child development factors beyond ECE?
  3. What have we learned from efforts to integrate enrollment and eligibility processes for health and human services?
  4. Are states and/or localities examining service delivery dynamics across ECE programs to assess availability of care slots and services to meet the needs of eligible families? How are they using data to understand service delivery dynamics?
  5. How is public and private ECE funding targeted to meet the needs of at-risk children and families?

To promote children’s healthy development and give them opportunities to flourish, families need a wide range of support services. These services are often disconnected from each other. Early care and education (ECE) has a particularly fragmented system (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2018). To improve understanding of approaches to coordinating ECE with other health and human services, the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) sponsored the Assessing Models of Coordinated Services (AMCS) project.

This brief describes findings from semi-structured telephone interviews with leaders from 18 coordinated services approaches that were identified as part of the AMCS project. These interviews—conducted between July and September 2020—provided in-depth information about how coordinated services approaches serve children and their families. Topics discussed in the interviews included information about the development of the coordinated services approach, the partners and funding involved in coordination, the services included in the coordinated services approach, and the coordinated services approach’s use of data. Findings suggest that coordinated services approaches are able to partner to coordinate services and support families and that they do so in varied ways that include aligning goals, sharing information, coordinating enrollment, blending funding, and collecting data.

The AMCS project was designed to answer six research questions. Of those, the research questions in the text box on the right are relevant to this brief.

Purpose

The Assessing Models of Coordinated Services (AMCS) project aimed to improve the understanding of approaches to coordinating services at the state or local level. This brief focuses on findings from telephone interviews with 18 coordinated services approaches. Specifically, we focus on how coordinated services approaches relied on partnerships to support families. Information about the ways that they partnered to align goals, share information, coordinate enrollment, blend funding, and collect data offers the field in-depth perspectives from a set of coordinated services approaches, while also providing foundational information for future research or programming efforts.

Key Findings and Highlights

Through telephone interviews, the Assessing Models of Coordinated Services (AMCS) research team learned that coordinated services approaches were able to coordinate partnerships and service application and delivery to serve children and their families.

  • Common goals among partners helped each partner stay motivated and focused on its role in the coordinated services approach. Collaborating with partners and aligning goals between a coordinated services approach and its partners helped each contribute to the collective goal of meeting families’ needs.
  • Coordinated services approaches engaged in partnerships to support access to, and enrollment in, early care and education (ECE) and other health and human services. Activities included examining and expanding the availability of care slots, and developing tools to share information about ECE options. In addition to supporting ECE access, coordinated services approaches worked to improve ECE quality.
  • Communication that supported information sharing was a key characteristic of successful partnerships. Coordinated services approaches reciprocally shared information and supports across state and local partners. Some state coordinated services approaches helped local partners coordinate to meet the needs of children and their families.
  • Braiding, blending, and combining funding with partners improved how coordinated services approaches provided services that met children and families’ needs. Some coordinated services approaches identified barriers to combining funding and using federal funding.
  • Data helped coordinated services approaches understand community, child, and family needs and tailor services to meet those needs; some coordinated services approaches supported data management for local partners. to help them focus on providing services to families.

Methods

This brief describes findings from semi-structured telephone interviews with leaders of 18 coordinated services approaches. These interviews—conducted between July and September 2020—built on AMCS’s national scan and provided in-depth information about how coordinated services approaches support children and their families. Interviews were conducted primarily in small groups with an average of 3 staff members from each coordinated services approach participating. The lessons learned and examples highlighted in the brief are based on the coding and thematic analysis of the information shared by the 18 coordinated services approaches in the interviews (9 state and 9 local). As such, the findings might not apply to all the coordinated services approaches interviewed, or to coordinated services approaches more broadly.

Citation

Fung, N., E. Cavadel, and S. Baumgartner. (2022). “Supporting Families Through Coordinated Services Partnerships.” OPRE Report 2022-52. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, Office of Planning, Research, and Evaluation..

Glossary

ECE:
Early care and education
Coordinated services approach:
A coordinated services effort by any individual program or a group of programs, an agency, department, or other organization focused on coordinating services for low-income families, at the state or local level.