Who are you and who are the members of your team?
Michelle Graef is the Project Director. Others team members from CCFL include: Megan Paul, Kate Stephenson, Maggie Thompson, Stephanie Weddington, Mark Ells, Stacie Zetocha, Chris Wiklund, Lauren Sparks, and Jessie Cook (now Charlie Lewis and Allison Jones). The Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Development (QIC-WD) is a collaborative agreement between the Children’s Bureau and UNL as the prime awardee. We have 4 other universities that are our project partners, with a small team of folks based at each of these universities: University of Louisville, University of Colorado-Denver, University of Tennessee-Knoxville, and the University of California-Los Angeles. We also have several independent consultants who are part of our project team: Great Eastern Consulting, CF Parry Associates, CLH Strategies & Solutions, and Dr. Tara Myers. All together there are about 30 people on this project team!
How long has your project been around?
The QIC-WD began in October 2016 and is a 5-year research project that is scheduled to end in September 2021. The purpose of the project is to build evidence of what works to improve the child welfare workforce, particularly in the areas of staff recruitment and retention.
What are you currently working on?
In our first year of operations, we conducted national outreach to solicit applications from state, county and tribal child welfare agencies to participate as one of our research project sites. We spent a good 6 months on a discernment process to identify the sites best suited to our project objectives, and ultimately chose 8 sites. Since last August, we’ve been engaged in a variety of project start-up activities with each of the jurisdictions, including implementation team structures, messaging about the project, and conducting an intensive workforce needs assessment. We have matched a multidisciplinary “WIE” team of three project members, each with expertise in workforce, implementation, or evaluation to each of the 8 sites. Some people have one site and a lucky few of us have two sites! Thus far, the WIE teams have been traveling to their site(s) approximately once a month for a full day meeting. The needs assessment process is winding down now, and in each site we’re working with the local team to conduct a root cause analysis and theory of change. Based upon our collective assessment of their turnover challenges, we’ll work with each site to identify or develop an intervention best suited to address their identified workforce need. So by the end of this summer our goal is to have finalized the intervention to be tested in each of our sites. We hope to test an interesting array of different workforce interventions across the 8 sites, such as innovative selection (hiring) processes, supportive supervision models, recruitment strategies, mobile technology, flexible scheduling, or job redesign, just to name a few! Then by this fall we will construct the most rigorous evaluation designs possible for these interventions, and begin the work of installing the interventions within the agency’s processes. The goal is to have the interventions fully implemented and running with fidelity by March 2019, which then leaves us with a full 2 years to implement them and collect process and outcome data. In addition to improved retention, the Children’s Bureau is interested in seeing how improvements in staff retention will impact case practice outcomes. So no pressure there! With it being only a 5 year project, we will be limited in what sorts of child and family outcomes can accrue in such a short time, but at least we can generate evidence to lay the groundwork for future studies.
Our site-based research studies are the primary work of the QIC-WD, but we have several additional deliverables we must produce over next few years. Megan is leading a herculean effort to conduct a comprehensive literature review of all of the workforce literature in social work and related fields, with a goal to develop a “catalog” of interventions and the level of evidentiary support for each one. That work will be integrated into our website. We are also conducting a national survey of child welfare agencies to identify the trends in child welfare workforce—what strategies are agencies implementing to try to address their workforce issues? Courtney Harrison, our wonderful dissemination strategist, is also leading the development of a series of videos we hope will showcase the work of the QIC-WD and our project sites.
So, to say we are busy is an understatement.
Any challenges in the project/job assignment?
This is a tremendously challenging and exciting project, with the potential to make a profound difference in field of child welfare nationally. We’re really happy that Nebraska is one of our project sites, so we can have a local impact as well. There are so many moving pieces and it feels like we’ve been going 100 miles an hour right out of the gate, with little opportunity to pause and reflect. I’m finding that there’s an extra layer of challenge in managing a project with so many team members, all with vast experience and national reputations, spread across the country. Thank goodness for Zoom!
Any resources or places we can visit to learn more about your project(s) i.e. Facebook, twitter, website etc.
Our website is http://www.qic-wd.org where you can sign up for our quarterly newsletter. We have blogs and really interesting “myth buster” articles to try to dispel common myths about workforce issues. And you can follow us on Twitter: @QICWD. Don’t be fooled…just because it shows my photo on the twitter account, I’m still willfully ignorant about social media, and plan to stay that way.