Building the Evidence Base to Support Promising Programs

Casey invests in increas­ing the sup­ply and use of evi­dence-based pro­grams with­in the child wel­fare, juve­nile jus­tice, men­tal health, health and edu­ca­tion sys­tems. Recent invest­ments have sup­port­ed the fol­low­ing programs:

• Fos­terEd improves the edu­ca­tion­al out­comes of stu­dents in fos­ter care by engag­ing edu­ca­tion­al cham­pi­ons to sup­port stu­dents’ aca­d­e­m­ic suc­cess, and is cur­rent­ly test­ing whether those efforts can be sus­tained and repli­cat­ed with­in pub­lic school systems.
   
• Orig­i­nal­ly devel­oped to treat young peo­ple with sig­nif­i­cant behav­ioral and con­duct prob­lems, the devel­op­ers of Func­tion­al Fam­i­ly Ther­a­py are now adapt­ing the pro­gram to deter­mine whether it has a pos­i­tive impact on the emo­tion­al well-being, pos­i­tive rela­tion­ships and proso­cial behav­ior of teens in the child wel­fare system.
   
• Jobs for the Future aims to dou­ble the num­ber of low-income youth and adults who com­plete post-sec­ondary edu­ca­tion by 2020. Three sites are cur­rent­ly prepar­ing for an eval­u­a­tion of their Back on Track mod­el, which puts youth who have dropped out of school on a path to post­sec­ondary education.