The United States is dealing with the effects of decades of change in traditional family structure. In 1970, fewer than one in three marriages were expected to end in divorce, 13 percent of children lived with a single parent, and 11 percent of all births were to unmarried women. In 2000, about 50 percent of marriages were expected to dissolve, half of all children could expect to live some time with a single parent, and one third of all births were to unmarried women.
Studies increasingly point to the critical role that a healthy marriage plays in healthy family functioning, child development, and economic self-sufficiency. And despite lower rates of marriage in low-income and African American populations, emerging research suggests that marriage is nevertheless desired—and healthy marriages are beneficial—in these populations as well.
Nearly 40 percent of single-headed families live below the poverty line; states and the federal government devote significant resources to help improve their circumstances. The federal government's welfare strategy centerpiece—Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF)—explicitly seeks to increase the proportion of children raised in two-parent families by reducing out-of-wedlock pregnancies, promoting marriage, and encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families. Increasingly, the federal government is supporting research, policy analysis, and programming—largely through the Administration for Children and Families' Healthy Marriage Initiative—to help youth, adults, and couples gain greater access to marriage education services where they can acquire the skills and knowledge necessary to form and sustain a healthy marriage.
What Lewin Can Do For You
Technical Assistance: Implementation
Lewin can help clients identify and prioritize key agency and program objectives relating to designing and implementing a healthy marriage program and/or launching a broad-based, multi-sector community-based healthy marriage initiative (HMI). Primary areas of technical assistance we can provide clients include:
- Strategic Planning: Identify goals and objectives and help develop corresponding plans of action for marketing, recruitment, and service delivery.
- Service Capacity Building: Design strategies for building capacity at the state, local, and community level, including the capacity to deliver marriage education training.
- Logic Model Development: Facilitate a process for working with project partners to:
- specify project goals, major intervention strategies and specific project activities, necessary inputs (resources), expected outputs (products), and expected outcomes (results, benefits);
- articulate underlying assumptions regarding what the problem is, why the problem exists, and why the proposed approach will work; and
- identify contextual factors (such as organizational structure and linkages, community attitudes) that may affect the success of the project, and to plan accordingly.
- Coalition Building: Craft strategies for building coalitions with public and private partners and provide "how-to"guidance.
- Marriage Education and Research Experts: Facilitate meetings and consultations with marriage experts and program providers.
- Development of a Domestic Violence Protocol: Facilitate a process for developing a domestic violence (DV) protocol tailored to the particular healthy marriage/relationship skills program and context in which it will be implemented.
- Funding Information: Identify potential sources of funding; provide guidance on accessing key funding streams; write grants.
Technical Assistance: Performance Monitoring and Evaluation
Lewin can assist with the development and implementation of performance management systems to track program performance. Primary areas of technical assistance we can provide clients include:
- Performance Measurement and Evaluation: Develop performance measures and evaluation design options, assist with local evaluation plans, tie performance measurement and evaluation design to project logic model.
- Management Information Systems (MIS) Development: Identify technology and options for collecting descriptive information on participants and tracking key program information (e.g., referrals, enrollment, participation) and outcomes (e.g., changes in knowledge, skills, attitudes and behavior) and documenting challenges, solutions, successes, accomplishments (intended and unintended), for the purpose of program management and improvement, outcomes evaluation, and reports to funders.
Program Evaluation
Lewin can help clients design and implement a rigorous but workable program evaluation to assess the degree to which the healthy marriage program/project has achieved its goals and produced desired outcomes. Our approaches include use of a logic model framework (see above) for designing both process and outcome evaluations.
Policy Analysis, Research and Evaluation
Government and organizational policies often touch families' lives and affect—either by design or inadvertently—their ability to form and sustain healthy marriages. Lewin can help clients identify and describe such policies and ascertain the effects of these policies. Lewin can conduct literature reviews on key marriage-related topics (such as the effect of domestic violence on children), which can be helpful to clients exploring areas to target for intervention and designing family support programs.
Resources
Lewin has developed resources for organizations and agencies interested in designing and implementing a healthy marriage program and/or launching a broad-based, multi-sector community-wide healthy marriage initiative. These materials and resources include:
- A 6 Step Plan for Starting a Community Healthy Marriage Initiative
- A Technical Assistance Tool Kit with the following modules:
- Training Materials.
- In March 2006, Lewin presented at ACF's annual Healthy Marriage Grantee Training and Technical Assistance Conference in Washington, DC on how to use logic models to monitor and refine healthy marriage projects. Click here for a copy of the presentation.
- In February 2006, Lewin developed materials and facilitated a one-day meeting in Orlando, FL with the four FL HMIs funded by the Children's Bureau, to help them diagnose "bottlenecks" and identify action steps for increasing program participation through improved marketing and recruitment strategies. Materials from this meeting include:
- In 2003, Lewin and ACF organized a number of two-day conferences in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to help attendees (current or potential HMIs) learn more about how to get started or how to continue to move forward with implementing their HMIs, and to give attandees the opportunity to share their experiences and network with one another. Materials from these conferences include:
Additional Information
For additional information, or to discuss contracting with Lewin for the above services, contact Dr. Sharon McGroder.