Category: Uncategorized

Reassessing Youth Villages’ Intercept® Program with Recent Data Following their report from last year, Scott Huhr and Fred Wulczyn report findings from their reassessment on the impact of Intercept using Tennessee DCS administrative data to examine a more recent period.  Intercept is an intensive in-home services program that targets families with children at risk of placement.   Key features of the program include program intensity (meeting with families an average of three times weekly), low staff caseloads of 4 – 5 families, active 24/7 on-call structure, and structured weekly supervision and consultation from a licensed clinician who is an expert in the model.  The state of Tennessee, which offers Intercept in various counties around the state, commissioned the study.  As before, results indicate that Intercept does significantly reduce the odds of placement. You can download the Executive Summary, or read below. You can also download the full paper here. Executive Summary… Read more >

A Case Study of Youth Villages’ Intercept® Program For the first report, Huhr and Wulczyn examined the effect of Intercept as a placement prevention program.  This second study examines whether Intercept increases permanency rates.  Intercept is an intensive services program that targets families with children at risk of placement and families with children who are already in foster care.  When working with families whose children are in foster care, Intercept focuses on increasing the likelihood of permanency. Key features of the program include program intensity (meeting with families an average of three times weekly), low staff caseloads of 4 – 5 families, active 24/7 on-call structure, and structured weekly supervision and consultation from a licensed clinician who is an expert in the model.  The state of Tennessee, which offers Intercept in various counties around the state, commissioned the study.  Results indicate that Intercept does significantly raise the odds of permanency… Read more >

Data Center staff recently completed a report entitled “Reentry to Foster Care: Identifying Candidates Under the Family First Act”, which can be downloaded by clicking here. Context and Purpose The Family First Prevention Services Act provides federal funding for evidence-based interventions for children who are at risk of coming into foster care (i.e., “candidates”). Most conversations are focused on services that prevent children from entering out of home care for the first time. However, there’s an equally important group of children at risk of placement into foster care: children who are at risk of returning to care. They, too, may benefit from the services made available through the Family First Prevention Services Act. The Study To address this policy question, we looked at three sets of risk factors with regard to the risk of returning to care: (1) demographic characteristics of children, (2) placement history, and (3) elapsed time since… Read more >

In our latest paper ‘Human Capital, Child Well-being, and Child Protection’, we propose a framework that adds human capital and human capital formation to the list of outcomes child welfare agencies should think about when their attention turns to child well-being.... Read more >