Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

The Children’s Bureau launched a two-phase grant initiative aimed at ending youth homelessness among individuals with a history of child welfare involvement in 2013. Eighteen communities were chosen and given $720,000 to spend two years developing comprehensive service models to serve youth ages 14 – 17 in foster care, youth ages 17 – 21 preparing to age out of foster care, and youth 17 – 21 who have experienced homelessness or unstable housing and were involved in the child welfare system. The grantees received technical assistance to help them plan for a rigorous evaluation of their comprehensive service model(s). Mid-way through the second year of the planning period, it became clear that grantees were making progress but would not be ready to engage in a rigorous evaluation. The Children’s Bureau opted to add an implementation phase to the grant effort. Six of the eighteen grantees were selected to continue planning and implementation to prepare for the rigorous evaluation.

The Office of Planning, Research & Evaluation funded a parallel multi-phase initiative to provide grantees evaluation technical assistance and document the multi-phase initiative. Grantees received predominantly group-based technical assistance in the first phase of the grant initiative. Group technical assistance is cost-effective but may not be able to address the full variety in grantees. Individual technical assistance is more costly but enables tailoring of technical assistance to the particular needs of grantees. Current technical assistance is offered in a more balanced approach with both individual- and group-based technical assistance.

As technical assistance becomes an important support to grantees and local evaluators, questions about content, delivery mode, and building collaborations with grantees and funders become important. Technical assistance can support grantees in completing the work of the grant in a thoughtful and deliberate way. The six grantees are working with dedicated technical assistance liaisons and using templates to help document their work and thought processes. The technical assistance will allow the funder to have a real-time understanding of what the grantees are accomplishing. The sharing of information also enables the funder and technical assistance teams to work together to support grantees and send similar messages – such as go slow to go fast.

This presentation will share lessons learned to date – including lessons for funders, grantees, and technical assistance providers. Multi-phase grant efforts are one way to focus funding on grantees who demonstrate capacity to do the work. However, there are down sides of multi-phase grant efforts as well, including contributing to competition rather than collaboration among grantees. A multi-phase grant initiative enables funders to address unanticipated challenges, such as difficulties in conducting data analyses to understand the populations and risk and protective factors. Increasing the number of phases may shift timelines for grantees, meaning additional support on understanding the importance of the new work may be needed. Technical assistance providers need to be nimble and understand the grantees to develop tools and resources that support the messages the funder is sending and supports grantees with particular tasks.