Regional Partnership Grants National Cross-Site Evaluation

The program, directed by the Children’s Bureau in the Administration for Children and Families, is a key federal program that the United States Congress authorizes to solely and specifically address the issues that arise at the intersection of child welfare and substance use.

RPG grantees are able to select, plan, and implement a slate of services and programs for families in their respective states and communities. Program guidelines require grantees to submit common measures of their performance, evaluate their programs, and participate in a national cross-site evaluation. Since 2012, Mathematica has designed and conducted the national cross-site evaluation, given technical assistance to grantees, and collected performance measures to support the RPG program.

Evidence, strategies, and tools generated by Mathematica have given Congress, the field, and grantees clarity about the extent to which partnerships collaborate; offer evidence-based programs and practices; and improve outcomes for children, adults, and families over time. For example, some of the emerging descriptive findings from our five-year cross-site evaluation of the 2012 cohort of 17 partnerships in 15 states include:

• After enrolling in an RPG program, adults who received SUD treatment had a decline in substance use and an improvement in mental health.
• For children, there were fewer episodes of maltreatment and removal from their homes, and other measures of children’s well-being largely improved or remained stable.
• Adults who reported at program entry that they used opioids tended to have greater needs than other adults in the RPG program, but their outcomes also improved significantly.

Mathematica also used the cross-site evaluation to estimate the impact of the RPG program by analyzing the outcomes of families receiving RPG services against those of a comparison group. This analysis was conducted with a subset of the grantees funded in 2014. The emerging findings reveal that the adults enrolled in RPG services had significantly fewer trauma symptoms and lower levels of depression. In addition, the children in RPG programs had significantly fewer behavior problems and higher levels of executive functioning.

In addition to conducting the national cross-site evaluation, Mathematica published a manual and conducted cost studies of programs that address adult trauma. We have also published technical assistance briefs on designing impact evaluations, using data collection incentives when studying people with SUD, and maintaining evaluation sample sizes—among other practices that can strengthen the RPG program.