Project Summary
The Colorado Community Response (CCR) program was an innovative, voluntary program to strengthen families. CCR was designed to prevent child maltreatment by increasing caregiver financial stability and access to community resources. Caregivers were referred to CCR after being reported to the state’s child abuse and neglect hotline and “screened out” by county child welfare staff because the allegations did not meet the statutory definition of abuse or neglect and/or the child was not at imminent risk of harm. The hallmarks of CCR were family-driven goal setting and comprehensive and short-term (about four months) case management to help families access formal and informal services. CCR was administered by the Colorado Department of Early Childhood (CDEC) and implemented by over 20 sites—typically non-profits but some county human service departments– across the state.
The Colorado Lab partnered with CDEC on a cost study (completed in 2021) and a randomized controlled trial (completed in 2023) to determine the efficiency and effectiveness of the program. The goal of the project was to determine whether CCR reduced future incidences of child welfare involvement, thereby establishing an evidence base for the program to inform future expansion and funding decisions.
Steps to Building Evidence
The cost analysis completed for this project was at Step 3 on the Steps to Building Evidence. This descriptive study provided important context for the results of the randomized controlled trial, which was at Step 5 on the Steps to Building Evidence.
Actionability
The CCR program was discontinued in 2024 with funding transitioned to the Family Resource Center (FRC) program which allows for ongoing engagement with welfare-referred families as well as voluntary participants. Importantly, the decision to suspend the program was not based exclusively on the results of this single randomized controlled trial. Before the randomized controlled trial was completed, state-level program leadership were aware of the outreach challenges and attempted several strategies to support sites. This included training in finding caregivers whose contact information was invalid, strengths-based approaches for engaging families, and peer training for sites with low outreach success rates from sites experiencing higher success rates. Additionally, the process for sharing referral information with implementing sites was refined and streamlined over time to mitigate the challenge of insufficient contact information. An implementation study would be necessary to better understand why these efforts were unsuccessful at reducing the variability in outreach success rates across sites.
Get Involved
For more information about working with the Colorado Lab, see Government and Community Partnerships or Research Partnerships.