Elevating Community Voice in Child Welfare

When communities help shape evaluation, programs become more responsive, relevant, and effective. CPPR joins practitioners and partners from across the country in a new national video series exploring participatory, community-engaged evaluation.

Produced by James Bell Associates on behalf of the Children's Bureau, the series showcases innovative approaches used by federally funded projects to strengthen families and communities.

The series brings together voices from four organizations implementing and evaluating services through Children's Bureau grants: Partnership Partnership for Strong Families (Gainesville, Florida), Brighton Center (Newport, Kentucky), Vision for Children at Risk (St. Louis, Missouri), and the University of Kansas CPPR. Together, these partners represent two national cohorts focused on family preservation and primary prevention in child welfare.

Advancing Participatory, Community-Engaged Evaluation

Each video in the series explores a foundational building block of participatory evaluation—an approach that prioritizes collaboration with community members, program participants, and service providers to ensure programs are responsive, relevant, and effective.

The four-part series includes:

• Part 1: Authentically Engaging Communities – emphasizing deep listening, shared power, and honoring community expertise
• Part 2: Building Trust – focusing on relationship-building as the foundation for meaningful evaluation
• Part 3: Co-designing and Co-leading Evaluations – highlighting collaborative approaches to shaping evaluation methods and goals
• Part 4: Sharing Data to Understand and Improve Programs – demonstrating how communities interpret and apply data to strengthen services

CPPR Leadership in Action

CPPR is represented in Parts 3 and 4 through insights from Jared Barton, director of CPPR, and Kaela Byers, former associate director of CPPR. Barton’s contributions underscore the importance of grounding evaluation in community context and shared understanding.

In discussing co-designed evaluation (Part 3), Barton highlights how community perspectives can reshape how success is defined:

“We could set a performance target… but the community and the steering committee… might say, ‘for our community that actually makes a lot of sense.’… All of those things—better measures, better targets, better results—are leading to more actionable next steps.”

Barton said the themes explored throughout the series reflect CPPR's approach to community-engaged work and evaluation.

"In Parts 3 and 4, you'll see a strong focus on co-designing evaluations with communities and using data to drive learning and improvement. What's really important to us at CPPR is that this isn't just a theoretical approach—it's how we work every day."

"Our sensemaking approach is about sharing power, elevating lived experience and ensuring data isn't just collected from communities, but generated with them and used in meaningful ways. That takes intention and trust, and it reflects our broader commitment to doing things differently and truly centering our partners and communities."

"We're proud to be part of that momentum and grateful to James Bell Associates, the Administration for Children and Families and the Children's Bureau for helping bring this work to a national audience."

Strengthening Child Welfare Through Collaboration

Each year, the Children's Bureau distributes congressionally appropriated funding to support innovative child welfare services. Increasingly, these initiatives incorporate participatory, community-engaged evaluation—an approach that not only measures outcomes but also elevates the voices of those most impacted.

Watch the Series

The full four-part series is available on the YouTube channel of James Bell Associates.