Location:

Minneapolis, Minnesota

 

Type of Organization:

Nonprofit

  Incarnation Family Connections
Agency Description: The Wayside House, Inc. is a local chemical health organization dedicated to providing treatment for chemical abuse exclusively to women. They have over 55 years of experience providing services to women with chemical and mental health needs especially those in poverty. The organization provides an array of services from treatment to recovery maintenance and owns housing units which provide recovering and recently sober women and their families an opportunity to live in a safe, healthy environment.

Project Description: The Incarnation Family Connections (IFC) treatment program is one of the programs implemented at The Wayside House. The IFC program is funded by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Children’s Bureau as a demonstration grant to provide comprehensive family treatment for chemically dependent mothers and their children. The overarching goal of the grant is to improve children’s safety, permanency, and well-being by treating the mother’s chemical dependency in a safe, residential environment. This approach is unique because it provides an alternative to out-of-home placement (“foster care”) for children. While in the IFC program mothers and/or pregnant women receive comprehensive services for their substance abuse and their children receive early intervention services, such as speech or language remediation, and for any developmental delays.

ACET services: ACET staff assisted IFC in the identification of appropriate tools to assess the family and screen dependent children at both pre- and post-treatment and collaborated with IFC to develop focus group and interview scripts for both IFC mothers, staff and community stakeholders. ACET also designed a rigorous evaluation plan using a quasi-experimental design and a comparison group to determine the impact of the IFC program on both mothers and their dependent children. ACET staff continues to provide TA to IFC staff in the implementation of the evaluation plan. In particular, ACET assists with modifying the IFC database to accommodate new data fields, tracking completion of assessments by all family members, and evaluation capacity building among IFC staff and their collaborative partners. ACET will also be completing yearly evaluation reports for IFC to share with their collaborative partners, funder, and the national cross-site evaluator.

Date of Service: 2009-Present