This initiative will provide Colorado a roadmap that leverages early, family-centered approaches and interventions that support lasting solutions for families to help them stabilize, heal, and reintegrate into their communities.
The Rewiring Initiative will include multiple counties that are committed to using the funds to create a system focused on preventing children from entering the child welfare system. Led by county human services agencies, each participating county is collaborating with community partners to provide these preventive services.
The Colorado Health Institute is partnering with the Tennyson Center for Children to evaluate the ongoing efforts of this initiative. The evaluation will provide a critical understanding of the impact of proactive prevention services on families. It also will allow rapid cycle response and learning to continue to meet the needs of families and children along the way. And finally, it presents a unique opportunity to understand how systems do or do not change, in order to enable Colorado to serve future generations.
The evaluation plan seeks to operationalize the vision to rewire the system by providing specific research questions and measures that will allow Tennyson and engaged counties to track progress over the course of five years. The evaluation plan is structured into three tiers:
Though these analyses are described as distinct, our assessment of these three tiers will be used to measure progress toward a rewired system. In other words, these three tiers are connected — the findings of a communities’ evaluation tiers must be viewed together, not in isolation.