Evidence2Success provides a framework for engaging communities and public systems in improving the well-being of children and youth. It helps identify problems and solutions proven to work. The six communities carrying out the framework are: Kearns Township in Salt Lake County, Utah; Mobile and Selma, Alabama; Providence, Rhode Island; Liberty City in Miami, Florida; and South City in Memphis, Tennessee.
Evidence2Success tools include:
- The Evidence2Success Youth Experience Survey: The survey provides public agencies and communities with a “big picture” look at the well-being of children and young people and the strengths and challenges that influence their development. Survey results describe the links between risks, protective factors and well-being and highlight areas in which public agencies and communities should focus their program investments.
- Blueprints for Healthy Youth Development: Blueprints makes it easy to match the strengths and needs of children and young people to cost-effective, evidence-based programs designed to help.
- Strategic Financing Tool Kit for Tested, Effective Programs: This tool kit outlines a five-step strategic finance planning process geared toward supporting programs that serve children and families. It aims to help public and community leaders work together to examine what they want to finance, how their current investments align with their financing goals, and which strategies can help them achieve these goals.
- Using What Works: A webinar series highlighting tools of the Evidence2Success framework.
- A Road Map to Quality Collective Impact Programming With Fiscal Independence: This report examines how the Children and Youth Cabinet of Rhode Island (CYC) — a coalition of organizations, systems, residents and youth organized around community-generated priorities — has changed since adopting the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s Evidence2Success framework seven years ago. CYC’s evolution generated valuable insights that can help other collective impact programs pursue sustainability and fiscal independence.
- Evidence2Success in Providence: This report offers an early look at how the Evidence2Success site in Providence implemented its action plan and the lessons local leaders have learned along the way.
Evidence2Success tools are available for any community to use, even if it is not one of the six current sites:
The Casey Foundation partnered with the Children and Youth Cabinet of Rhode Island to formally launch Evidence2Success in July 2012. More than 55 CYC and community members from the two participating neighborhoods — South Providence/Elmwood and West End — came together to set priority outcomes for kids’ healthy development: chronic absenteeism, suspension, anxiety and depression, emotional regulation and delinquency. These priorities — collaboratively selected by public systems and communities — were based on the results of the Youth Experience Survey of nearly 6,000 middle and high school students in the Providence Public School District.
Later, several evidence-based programs were selected to address these priorities. These initiatives are now reaching more than 4,000 young people. Read about early results of a cognitive behavioral intervention in the Roger Williams Middle School in the South Side of Providence and a report about the how the Rhode Island partners built a structure for quality, sustainable collective impact.
In late 2015 and early 2016, the Foundation added three new Evidence2Success communities in Selma and Mobile, Alabama, and the Kearns Township in Salt Lake County, Utah. In 2018, Casey added Liberty City in Miami, Florida, and South City in Memphis, Tennessee.
Through testing and evaluation, Evidence2Success aims to demonstrate that communities can improve young people’s well-being by investing in evidence-based programs. This includes:
- forming partnerships that engage elected officials, public agencies and the community in working together to improve child well-being;
- collecting and analyzing data to establish priorities based on kids’ strengths and needs;
- selecting evidence-based programs that focus on prevention and early intervention, instead of waiting until after problems occur to intervene; and
- analyzing the effectiveness of current investments and shifting a percentage of funding toward evidence-based programs.
Casey also provides coaching and technical assistance to help city and state agencies build their capacity to target their investments to support the staffing, training and data analysis required to effectively deliver evidence-based programs.
A video shows how Evidence2Success has been working in Providence, Rhode Island, the first Evidence2Success site.
Another video, Evidence2Success: Tools for Fund-Mapping the Future, shows how Evidence2Success strategic financing tools are helping communities in Alabama, Rhode Island and Utah pull together local data to better align resources with locally determined priority outcomes.
Evidence2Success was profiled in a Stanford Social Innovation Review article about community engagement. The article makes the case that community engagement is a critical component of effective data-driven, evidence-based social change, and profiles Evidence2Success as an example of utilizing such strategies.
Strategic Financing Tool Kit for Tested, Effective Programs outlines a five-step strategic finance planning process geared toward supporting programs that serve children and families.
A Road Map to Quality Collective Impact Programming With Fiscal Independence: This report examines how the Children and Youth Cabinet of Rhode Island (CYC), a coalition of organizations, systems, residents and youth organized around community-generated priorities, has changed since adopting the Casey Foundation’s Evidence2Success framework in 2012. CYC’s evolution generated valuable insights that can help other collective impact programs pursue sustainability and fiscal independence.
Evidence2Success in Providence: This report offers an early look at how the Evidence2Success site in Providence implemented its action plan and the lessons local leaders have learned along the way.
Using What Works to Improve Child Well-Being — Casey’s webinar series hosted by the Forum for Youth Investment — is designed to help local government officials, community-based service providers, foundation and nonprofit leaders and others working to improve outcomes for children and families. The series highlights tools and strategies now operating in four U.S. communities.
Evidence2Success builds on the work of the Annie E. Casey Foundation and a range of partners dedicated to researching, developing, testing and communicating what works to improve outcomes for children. Partners include:
The Social Development Research Group (SDRG) is an internationally recognized team of researchers dedicated to promoting healthy behaviors and positive social development among young people. Much of SDRG’s work is based on their pioneering Social Development Model, which led to the development and testing of Communities That Care (CTC), a coalition-based system proven to prevent adolescent problem behaviors such as violence, delinquency and substance abuse.
The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV) at the University of Colorado Boulder was founded in 1992 to build bridges between the research community and the practitioners and policy makers seeking to understand and prevent violence, particularly adolescent violence. The CSPV Blueprints for Violence Prevention website identifies violence and drug prevention programs that meet a high scientific standard of effectiveness.
Mainspring Consulting helps policymakers, state and community leaders and foundation officers to strengthen and grow their work. To support the design of effective programs and initiatives for children, families and communities, Mainspring advises clients on what works, helps them develop a theory of change and develops training and technical assistance strategies to meet identified needs.
Social Research Unit at Dartington (SRU) is an independent charitable organization dedicated to conducting research and translating evidence into policy and practice to improve outcomes for children. Based in the United Kingdom, SRU conducts research to establish the potential causes of problems that affect children’s development and to test the value of children’s services. SRU also disseminates high quality evidence about what works, for which children, why and at what cost.
The Pennsylvania State University Edna Bennett Pierce Prevention Research Center is an interdisciplinary research center devoted to improving the health and well-being of children, youth, and families through prevention research.
