An explicit premise of Family to Family is that its planning, implementation, and evaluation should be guided by clear and specific goals, and that grantees need good performance data to guide them toward those goals. Unfortunately, in spite of the volume of data collected about children in out-of-care, child welfare managers often are unable to provide quick and reliable responses to questions posed by policymakers and the public.

The only information usually is a monthly or quarterly snapshot of the caseload of children in care on a given day. This information is essential to maintaining basic management accountability, but it does not capture the experience of all children served by the child welfare system. In fact, caseload snapshots are biased toward the experience of children who have the worst experiences in out-of –home care. As a result, such data present the child welfare system in a persistently bad light that undermines the confidence of policymakers and the public.

Given this premise, the Foundation sought to build capacity for “self-evaluation” among Family to Family states and communities. The thrust of this capacity-building effort was threefold