Reframing Childhood Adversity
Promoting Upstream Approaches

This series of three evaluation briefs was produced by Child Safety Forward, a national initiative to reduce child abuse and neglect fatalities and injuries through a collaborative, community-based approach. This demonstration initiative, for which Social Current is the technical assistance provider, works to develop and test multidisciplinary strategies in five different demonstration sites over three years. These briefs were created as part of the initiative’s developmental evaluation approach.

During year one, the planning year, those participating in the initiative built a theory of change and implementation plans that would lead to a strengthened child and family well-being system. In year two, while focused on implementation, the initiative refined the theory of change to include greater intentionality around three core conditions they believe are necessary to having this impact:

• Elevate families into relationships of equal power within systems
• Build intentional strategy to systematically assess and address racism
• Sustain communications strategy

Each brief in this series takes a deeper look at one of these conditions. They highlight how Child Safety Forward is defining the condition, the strategies and approaches it believes will advance this condition, and the intermediate outcomes from those strategies. In addition, based on early learning during the first year of Child Safety Forward, it outlines a roadmap for this strategy. These roadmaps will be further refined through the implementation study conducted at the end of the second year of implementation and will contribute to each’s sites plans for sustainability.