Allon Kalisher is a hands-on expert in child welfare programs, policies, and data. He has more than 20 years of experience working in a state child welfare system, from the frontline to senior leadership roles in operations and strategic, analytic, and quality improvement. Kalisher led projects to build child welfare workforce capacity to use data, efforts to improve the quality of federal data submissions such as the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) and the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System (NCANDS), and numerous analyses to support performance evaluation and strategic planning. He also applied his child welfare administrative expertise overseeing contract agencies, child protective services, adolescent services, foster care, adoption, voluntary behavioral health services, and juvenile justice. His oversight of juvenile justice, he focused on reducing length of stay, improving diversion, and implementing new practice models.
Kalisher, who joined Mathematica in 2019, is supporting several existing projects and emerging partnerships to advance work in child welfare focused on data quality, predictive analytics, data linking, data analysis training, and program evaluation and planning. He currently supports multiple projects for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, including projects focused on the Family First Prevention and Services Act, termination of parenting rights exceptions, and the Multi-Ethnic Placement Act.
Kalisher came to Mathematica from the Connecticut Department of Children and Families (DCF), where he served as the Child and Family Services Review Program Improvement Plan manager, and from New Zealand’s Centre for Social Data Analytics, where he consulted on the implementation of the Douglas County Decision Aide (a predictive risk model designed to support call-screening decisions) developed for Douglas County, Colorado. Before that, he was a regional administrator for the Connecticut DCF’s Region 3. He started his career in child welfare as a frontline social worker. He holds an M.S.W. from the University of Connecticut.
Child welfare agencies face a twofold dilemma. Not only has the visibility of at-risk children been reduced, children in foster care and those at home no longer have a social worker seeing them in-person on a regular basis.
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