Strengthening a Family-Serving Organization
Lessons learned from a partnership between Agape Child & Family Services, Mathematica, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation
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Associated Project
Support for Agape Child & Family Services’ 2Gen Model
Prepared for:
Agape Child & Family Services
The Annie E. Casey Foundation
Key Findings
- Challenges uncovered in one part of a family-serving organization might open organization-wide opportunities for better coordination and integration
- Leaders in family-serving organizations should empower staff, participants, and community partners to work collectively to achieve their goals
- Developing individualized, tailored, and relationship-driven services requires the ability to combine many types of information
- Maintaining high-quality family-centered services requires ongoing attention to several aspects of implementation
In 2020, the Annie E. Casey Foundation brought together Agape Child & Family Services, a community- and faith-based organization in Memphis, Tennessee, and Mathematica to find ways to continue serving Memphis families during the COVID-19 public health emergency. This partnership—called REVISE-2G— is an innovative example of participatory grant making. The goal of participatory grant making is to shift power from the funder and the researchers toward the provider to make funding decisions more responsive to community priorities. The participatory grant making approach helped build knowledge for the field while building the capacity of family-serving organizations to improve outcomes for families. Through REVISE-2G, Agape continually built staff and organizational capacity to address topics that are fundamental to the mission of centering and enabling families to achieve their goals, including making organizational changes to empower staff, leading a nimble and innovative organization, becoming evidence driven, and measuring family-centered service delivery. This brief shares lessons from REVISE-2G that can help researchers, practitioners, and funders better understand how to implement and support family-centered services.
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