This week we will learn about the Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development. Thank you Michelle Graef for providing the following information about your project.
What is the project, when did it begin, and how long is it for? The Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD) is dedicated to building the evidence base on how to improve child welfare workforce outcomes. Through rigorous evaluation, the QIC-WD will enhance what is known about evidence-informed workforce interventions and how they are related to outcomes for children. This is a 5-year project that began in October 2016, and is funded by the federal Children’s Bureau/ACF/HHS. UNL/CCFL is the lead on this cooperative agreement, and we have partnered with colleagues at three other universities and three independent consultants.
Drawing from a variety of fields, we’re currently gathering the literature about workforce trends and strategies that work in areas such as staff recruitment, selection, retention, and agency culture and climate. Based on our systematic literature review we’ll be building an online, searchable catalog of workforce strategies and their level of evidentiary support. In addition, we’ll be conducting rigorous tests of these promising strategies in child welfare agencies. Towards that end, we put out a national call for applications to identify project demonstration sites. We received applications from 26 child welfare jurisdictions from across the country, and are now doing site visits, with a goal of selecting between 5-10 state, county, and tribal child welfare agencies with whom we’ll partner to conduct our research. Those sites will be announced in August. Each selected site will be matched with a team of three experts from our project with expertise in Workforce, Implementation, and Evaluation (WIE). These WIE teams will work closely with sites over the next 4 years to identify their workforce needs, design or adapt a promising workforce intervention to meet those needs, implement it with fidelity, and test its effectiveness for improving staff workforce outcomes, as well as the impact on child and family outcomes.
Who are the members of the project? Across all of our partners, the project currently involves about 25 people. The team from CCFL includes: Megan Paul (Workforce Lead), Kate Stephenson (Workforce Specialist), Stephanie Weddington (Workforce Specialist), Mark Ells (Implementation Specialist), Jessie Cook (Web Developer), Philip Simmons (GRA), Lauren Sparks (GRA), and I (PI/Project Director). Chris Wiklund has been providing excellent meeting and travel coordination until we can get our Project Coordinator/Financial Assistant hired, which will hopefully be this summer.
What’s the most exciting or best part of getting to work on or being part of this project? I’m pretty competitive and enjoy “the hunt” of finding and applying for new grants, so when the forecast for this grant opportunity came out, I got pretty riled up! For me personally, it’s like a wonderful capstone project for my career, as it builds on all of my interests and experience from 25 years at CCFL in workforce, implementation science (e.g., MCWIC), and evaluation research. We have the most amazing project dream team—colleagues, both at CCFL and national, some of whom I’ve been friends with for many years but never had the chance to work with until now. Add to that the excitement of the work itself—we get to design and conduct rigorous evaluations of interesting workforce strategies, and help child welfare agencies across the country improve how they operate and serve families. You can’t get much cooler than that!