Children & Family Services
New York City Administration for Children’s Services:
- Developing a Procedure for Assessing Support Service Needs and Allocating Resources
- Analysis of the Distribution of Home Languages Spoken in Community Districts
- Preventive Services: Focus Group Study and Survey
- Evaluation of ACS/ Bellevue Mental Health Program
- Department of Child Protection: Self-Evaluation
- Youth Financial Empowerment: Evaluation
The New York City Administration for Children’s Services (ACS), a vast and complex agency, bears the enormous weight of protecting thousands of New York City children at risk for abuse and neglect. Since 2001, Metis Associates has provided a wide range of research, analysis, and technical assistance services for ACS to improve its child-welfare services.
One of the largest projects that Metis has completed for ACS was to develop a rational and empirical procedure for assessing preventive and family-support service needs across New York City’s 59 community districts. Metis obtained and analyzed a wide variety of needs-related indicators, such as income, housing, education, and crime, to demonstrate which communities were in need of greater resources. The model that was developed continues to provide direction to ACS for the systematic allocation of funds and services to community districts based on their needs. Following this work, Metis was asked by ACS to analyze the geographic distribution of home languages spoken in New York City to help ACS better target staff resources throughout the city. More recently, Metis has conducted a survey project for ACS, including interviews with ACS staff and service providers, to learn which aspects of the system they believe are functioning well and which they believe may need to be improved. Finally, Metis served as the evaluator for ACS’s collaborative program with Bellevue Hospital Center’s Department of Psychiatry to determine whether the efforts of a joint Bellevue/ACS mental health team had been successful in its goal of reducing the number of visits to the psychiatric emergency room.
Metis is currently engaged in a significant project for the ACS Division of Child Protection to facilitate and develop a framework for its transition to self-evaluation. The division, which investigates reports of abuse and neglect, wanted to better understand its work and make any needed changes. Metis staff members are currently coaching the Queens and citywide self-evaluation teams, helping them look at data to understand the connections among their strategies, activities and outcomes. Self-evaluation teams, involving all levels of staff, will eventually be in place in all five boroughs. Metis is also evaluating ACS’s Youth Financial Empowerment program, which was developed for teenagers and young adults who are aging out of foster care. The program provides the young people with financial literacy training and helps them open Individual Development Accounts (IDAs)—bank accounts in which their savings are matched by corporate partners. Metis is helping ACS to develop data-collection tools, a youth survey, and management information systems to track the progress of the initiative over the long term.