The Impact of Major Events on the Lives of Family Caregivers of Children with Disabilities

Copyright 1996 Families International, Inc.The authors examine the family caregiving experience among families with children with severe emotional disabilities from a perspective that recognizes the importance of the family's views and feelings. This viewpoint anticipates the occurrence of both positive and negative experiences and seeks to illuminate the caregiving process from the perspective of outcomes achieved. Family caregivers of 164 children with serious emotional disorders were asked to identify major pleasant and stressful events that had occurred in the past 12 months. The most frequently described pleasant events related to children's behavior, school activities, and interactions with professionals and friends. Frequently described problem areas included children's behavior, professionals/services, and difficulty with school. The impact of these pleasant and stressful events was examined with respect to caregivers' perceived well-being: (I) overall stress, (2) the ability to fulfill responsibilities, and (3) pleasure experienced in various life domains. Implications of the study findings for supporting family caregivers in their roles are discussed

Advancing a Conceptual Model of Evidence-Based Practice Implementation in Public Service Sectors

Implementation science is a quickly growing discipline. Lessons learned from business and medical settings are being applied but it is unclear how well they translate to settings with different historical origins and customs (e.g., public mental health, social service, alcohol/drug sectors). The purpose of this paper is to propose a multi-level, four phase model of the implementation process (i.e., Exploration, Adoption/Preparation, Implementation, Sustainment), derived from extant literature, and apply it to public sector services. We highlight features of the model likely to be particularly important in each phase, while considering the outer and inner contexts (i.e., levels) of public sector service systems

Learning from Starting Points: Findings from the Starting Points Assessment Project

In 1994, the Carnegie Corporation of New York issued a report titled Starting Points: Meeting the Needs of Our Youngest Children. Calling its findings “a quiet crisis,” the report urged the federal government, states, community leaders, educators, health care decision-makers, service providers, business, leaders, parents, and the philanthropic community to actively work toward four broad goals: promoting responsible parenthood, guaranteeing child care choices, ensuring good health and protection, and mobilizing communities to support young children and their families. Heeding its own call, in January 1996, the Carnegie Corporation made the first awards for the Starting Points States and Communities Partnership for Young Children Grants, a four-and-a-half year, $7 million initiative. Focusing on program improvement, policy development, and public engagement and awareness, the aim was to serve as a catalyst to seed activities to spur both short and long-term systems change within selected states and communities. In 1999, the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) was asked to undertake an assessment of Starting Points to document the variations in context, structure, activities, and accomplishments across the 11 sites that were funded throughout the initiative, including four city sites: Baltimore, Boston, Pittsburgh, and San Francisco; and seven states: Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont, and West Virginia. The cross-site assessment focused on the following questions: • What were the variations in the structure, auspices, and leadership across the sites? • How did the demographic, policy, economic, and political contexts vary across the sites? • What was the range of activities and accomplishments across the sites? • What were the most common positive and negative mediating factors across the sites? • How did the sites perceive the strengths and limitations of the Starting Points initiative? • What were the collective lessons and implications for future multisite early childhood systems change initiatives? Findings from the assessment, based on reviews of written materials, interviews and debriefing of key informants, and analysis of the data, are highlighted below. The full report is available on the Internet at www.nccp.org and in paper from the Publications Department of NCCP. Profiles of the individual Starting Points sites are also on NCCP’s Web site

The Role of Community Development Corporations in Promoting the Well-Being of Young Children

Over the past decade, considerable public and private attention has been focused on strengthening strategies for early childhood development and family support. States are steadily increasing support for child development, child care, and family support programs targeting young children and families, and initiatives focused on cities are growing. Advocates have promoted broad community mobilization and public awareness about the importance of early childhood. For the most part, however, activity to promote healthy child development and provide support to families with young children has not been linked with efforts to promote family economic security in low-income communities. At the same time, initiatives to promote community building and address economic issues in low-income communities have typically not explicitly addressed the developmental and family support needs of young children and families. Recognizing this, the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) decided to undertake an exploratory project to see what community-based organizations in low-income communities and neighborhoods are doing to promote the healthy development of low-income young children and families through child development and family support strategies. Our original aim was to include Comprehensive Community Initiatives as well as Empowerment Zones in our effort. However, at the time the project began, Comprehensive Community Initiatives did not generally address issues facing young children, and the Empowerment Zones generally focused only on child care.3 Therefore, NCCP chose to focus on community development corporations, or CDCs. CDCs are, in effect, the "bread and butter" of community building. Typically, CDCs work to promote community leadership and economic development. In viewing CDCs through a young child and family lens, the hope was that this study would identify approaches that could be nurtured and grown. Absent that, the hope was to learn what else might be done to capitalize on the strengths of CDCs in promoting improved outcomes to young children