Families & Schools Together Evaluation Redesign

Project Description Narrative:

Engagement from parents, guardians, and trusted community leaders is key to ensuring every child's health, wellness and safety where they live, learn, play and grow. Families and Schools Together, or FAST®, is a program used internationally to foster community relationships, build social capital, and connect families to vital community resources.

Despite positive outcomes, sites often struggle to fund, build and maintain support for the program, preventing future families from the opportunity to benefit from the program. Previous data has pointed to an outdated evaluation process that is overly burdensome and does not produce usable results for sites to advocate for continued support of the program. This project aimed to engage key stakeholders in redesigning FAST's® program evaluation and improvement process to collaboratively plan for scale-up of effective family engagement programming across Wisconsin to sustain increases in positive health outcomes for children and families.

Project partners: Center for Community and Nonprofit Studies (CommNS) at UW-Madison, Families & Schools Together, Inc.