Taking a New Approach to Tribal Child Welfare

Two years ago, the Children’s Bureau launched the Roadmap for Co-Creating Collaborative & Effective Evaluation to Improve Tribal Child Welfare Programs. It’s a long title for a concise aim: to change the way child welfare is handled for tribal families.

To that end, the Children’s Bureau convened the Tribal Evaluation Workgroup in 2012. Most of the 21 members in the workgroup were tribal members, representing regions and cultural communities across the country. Focusing on the need for “fundamental change in the way evaluation is practiced within tribal contexts,” as noted in the Roadmap, they created this strategic plan to direct and manage that change.

The workgroup had found that some research and evaluation approaches were “not well aligned” with tribes’ experiences, worldviews, values, and resources. “Many Tribes,” the workgroup members noted, “can recount past experiences of having been unwilling subjects of outsiders’ research, refused access to the data collected about them, or harmed by conclusions drawn from data that were deemed more valid than their own.”

Part of the problem, the workgroup concluded, was that evaluation questions and methods failed previously to acknowledge and respect familial and community social structures, caretaking norms and traditions, cultural values, political and economic contexts, and worldviews about life, the human condition, family, permanency, well-being, and knowledge.

The Roadmap’s visual representation of overlapping and interwoven circles in its overall strategic plan is both functional and symbolic. One circle, for instance, represents the continuous cycle of program improvement through evaluation, and a larger outer circle shows how history has shaped current practice and how lessons learned can improve practice. Values such as respect for tribal sovereignty head the map. The center of it all—“Building a New Narrative”—includes locally guided questions, data, and insight.

Value 1, Indigenous Ways of Knowing, advocates using the best and most rigorous scientific methods but with an emphasis on respecting cultural protocols, such as identifying who can speak for the tribe in approving evaluation and research projects. It also acknowledges the importance of the oral tradition in gathering and disseminating information. Evaluations, the workgroup advises, should be grounded in the Native community’s ways of understanding, including the community’s unique perspective on what it means “to come to know” and how to establish research outcomes and data collection methods.

Workgroup members intend the Roadmap as a tool to facilitate discussions, partnerships, planning, policy making, and developing new ways of conducting evaluations in and with tribal communities. They suggest federal and state funders could use the Roadmap to establish more consistent and responsive evaluation requirements that promote the inclusion of tribally identified evaluation questions. Another possible use could be for tribal governments, research review boards, or Institutional Review Boards to incorporate components of the Roadmap into their guidelines for researchers and evaluators working within tribal communities.

Ultimately, the workgroup says, the goal of evaluation is to learn how to support the population’s well-being, not to test a model to export to other tribal communities. “Evaluations should tell stories that teach lessons,” they say. “Evaluation, like storytelling, is about learning.”

Two years ago, the Children’s Bureau launched the Roadmap for Co-Creating Collaborative & Effective Evaluation to Improve Tribal Child Welfare Programs. It’s a long title for a concise aim: to change the way child welfare is handled for tribal families.

To that end, the Children’s Bureau convened the Tribal Evaluation Workgroup in 2012. Most of the 21 members in the workgroup were tribal members, representing regions and cultural communities across the country. Focusing on the need for “fundamental change in the way evaluation is practiced within tribal contexts,” as noted in the Roadmap, they created this strategic plan to direct and manage that change.

The workgroup had found that some research and evaluation approaches were “not well aligned” with tribes’ experiences, worldviews, values, and resources. “Many Tribes,” the workgroup members noted, “can recount past experiences of having been unwilling subjects of outsiders’ research, refused access to the data collected about them, or harmed by conclusions drawn from data that were deemed more valid than their own.”

Part of the problem, the workgroup concluded, was that evaluation questions and methods failed previously to acknowledge and respect familial and community social structures, caretaking norms and traditions, cultural values, political and economic contexts, and worldviews about life, the human condition, family, permanency, well-being, and knowledge.

The Roadmap’s visual representation of overlapping and interwoven circles in its overall strategic plan is both functional and symbolic. One circle, for instance, represents the continuous cycle of program improvement through evaluation, and a larger outer circle shows how history has shaped current practice and how lessons learned can improve practice. Values such as respect for tribal sovereignty head the map. The center of it all—“Building a New Narrative”—includes locally guided questions, data, and insight.

Value 1, Indigenous Ways of Knowing, advocates using the best and most rigorous scientific methods but with an emphasis on respecting cultural protocols, such as identifying who can speak for the tribe in approving evaluation and research projects. It also acknowledges the importance of the oral tradition in gathering and disseminating information. Evaluations, the workgroup advises, should be grounded in the Native community’s ways of understanding, including the community’s unique perspective on what it means “to come to know” and how to establish research outcomes and data collection methods.

Workgroup members intend the Roadmap as a tool to facilitate discussions, partnerships, planning, policy making, and developing new ways of conducting evaluations in and with tribal communities. They suggest federal and state funders could use the Roadmap to establish more consistent and responsive evaluation requirements that promote the inclusion of tribally identified evaluation questions. Another possible use could be for tribal governments, research review boards, or Institutional Review Boards to incorporate components of the Roadmap into their guidelines for researchers and evaluators working within tribal communities.

Ultimately, the workgroup says, the goal of evaluation is to learn how to support the population’s well-being, not to test a model to export to other tribal communities. “Evaluations should tell stories that teach lessons,” they say. “Evaluation, like storytelling, is about learning.”

Two years ago, the Children’s Bureau launched the Roadmap for Co-Creating Collaborative & Effective Evaluation to Improve Tribal Child Welfare Programs. It’s a long title for a concise aim: to change the way child welfare is handled for tribal families.

To that end, the Children’s Bureau convened the Tribal Evaluation Workgroup in 2012. Most of the 21 members in the workgroup were tribal members, representing regions and cultural communities across the country. Focusing on the need for “fundamental change in the way evaluation is practiced within tribal contexts,” as noted in the Roadmap, they created this strategic plan to direct and manage that change.

The workgroup had found that some research and evaluation approaches were “not well aligned” with tribes’ experiences, worldviews, values, and resources. “Many Tribes,” the workgroup members noted, “can recount past experiences of having been unwilling subjects of outsiders’ research, refused access to the data collected about them, or harmed by conclusions drawn from data that were deemed more valid than their own.”

Part of the problem, the workgroup concluded, was that evaluation questions and methods failed previously to acknowledge and respect familial and community social structures, caretaking norms and traditions, cultural values, political and economic contexts, and worldviews about life, the human condition, family, permanency, well-being, and knowledge.

The Roadmap’s visual representation of overlapping and interwoven circles in its overall strategic plan is both functional and symbolic. One circle, for instance, represents the continuous cycle of program improvement through evaluation, and a larger outer circle shows how history has shaped current practice and how lessons learned can improve practice. Values such as respect for tribal sovereignty head the map. The center of it all—“Building a New Narrative”—includes locally guided questions, data, and insight.

Value 1, Indigenous Ways of Knowing, advocates using the best and most rigorous scientific methods but with an emphasis on respecting cultural protocols, such as identifying who can speak for the tribe in approving evaluation and research projects. It also acknowledges the importance of the oral tradition in gathering and disseminating information. Evaluations, the workgroup advises, should be grounded in the Native community’s ways of understanding, including the community’s unique perspective on what it means “to come to know” and how to establish research outcomes and data collection methods.

Workgroup members intend the Roadmap as a tool to facilitate discussions, partnerships, planning, policy making, and developing new ways of conducting evaluations in and with tribal communities. They suggest federal and state funders could use the Roadmap to establish more consistent and responsive evaluation requirements that promote the inclusion of tribally identified evaluation questions. Another possible use could be for tribal governments, research review boards, or Institutional Review Boards to incorporate components of the Roadmap into their guidelines for researchers and evaluators working within tribal communities.

Ultimately, the workgroup says, the goal of evaluation is to learn how to support the population’s well-being, not to test a model to export to other tribal communities. “Evaluations should tell stories that teach lessons,” they say. “Evaluation, like storytelling, is about learning.”