CASAWORKS for Families

Abstract

This chapter describes how inter-agency collaboratives designed and delivered comprehensive, integrated services for substance-abusing welfare mothers as part of a national welfare-to-work demonstration project (CASAWORKS for Families). A new approach to combining treatment and training and delivering such services in community-based settings required organizational learning and capacity building. Implementing the CASAWORKS model successfully was expected to require significant capacity-building and learning for sites in the project. As part of the project we undertook an evaluation of organizational capacity and learning that assessed the extent to which, and the processes through which, sites developed the capacities to design and deliver integrated services for clients. This chapter describes the capacities that sites needed to develop and profiled sites that were successful and unsuccessful in developing the organizational capacity to implement the CASAWORKS model effectively. We report results of research indicating that our measures of organizational capacity and learning predicted client outcomes at successful sites, and we discuss how the sites achieved these outcomes. The fact that differences across sites are often greater than differences due to components of an intervention suggests that organizational capacity and learning may be much more important in all kinds of national demonstration projects than has been recognized.