Strategic Planning, Policy & Program Analysis, & Capacity Building
New York City Administration for Children’s Services: Development of a Procedure for Assessing Support Service Needs and for Allocating Resources
Analysis of the Distribution of Home Languages Spoken in Community Districts
Department of Child Protection (DCP): Self-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.
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 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.