Abstract
This chapter describes how inter-agency collaboratives designed and delivered comprehensive, integrated services for substance-abusing welfare mothers as part of a national welfare-to-work demonstration project (CASAWORKS for Families). A new approach to combining treatment and training and delivering such services in community-based settings required organizational learning and capacity building. Implementing the CASAWORKS model successfully was expected to require significant capacity-building and learning for sites in the project. As part of the project we undertook an evaluation of organizational capacity and learning that assessed the extent to which, and the processes through which, sites developed the capacities to design and deliver integrated services for clients. This chapter describes the capacities that sites needed to develop and profiled sites that were successful and unsuccessful in developing the organizational capacity to implement the CASAWORKS model effectively. We report results of research indicating that our measures of organizational capacity and learning predicted client outcomes at successful sites, and we discuss how the sites achieved these outcomes. The fact that differences across sites are often greater than differences due to components of an intervention suggests that organizational capacity and learning may be much more important in all kinds of national demonstration projects than has been recognized.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
M. GEPHART ASSOCIATES LLC, Organizational Learning and Capacity Building Evaluation of CASAWORKS for Families, 1998–2001.
- 2.
The CASAWORKS version of the instrument— Assessing Organizational Capacity and Learning for Collaboration and Service Delivery —was copyrighted in 2000 to M. GEPHART ASSOCIATES LLC.
References
Himmelman, A. T. (1997). Devolution as an experiment in citizen governancy: Multi-organization partnerships and democratic revolutions. Working paper, Fourth annual conference on multi-organizational partnerships and cooperative strategy, Oxford.
Townsend, S. S. (2008). How judges can build multidisciplinary collaborations to benefit children and families. White paper, Child Welfare Court Improvement Project, originally published in Future Trends in State Courts (2007).
Woolis, D., Nakashian, M., Fox, L., James, S., Gephart, M. A., & Marsick, V. J. (2001). Learning our way through welfare reform. Policy and Practice of Public Human Services, 59(2), 28–33.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gephart, M.A., Marsick, V.J. (2016). CASAWORKS for Families. In: Strategic Organizational Learning. Management for Professionals. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48642-9_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-48642-9_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-662-48641-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-662-48642-9
eBook Packages: Business and ManagementBusiness and Management (R0)