Establish central region innovation hub to implement, evaluate, and disseminate tech-enhanced adoption recruitment and matching practices that improve outcomes for children and youth in foster care - NORC at the University of Chicago proposes to establish the Central Region Technology-Enhanced Adoption Recruitment and Matching (TE-ARM) Innovation Hub to improve adoption recruitment and matching outcomes for children and youth in foster care awaiting permanency. The project aligns with the Children's Bureau's goal of advancing technology-enabled, data-informed solutions that strengthen child welfare agencies' capacity to recruit, identify, and match adoptive families while improving placement quality, timeliness, and stability. The Central Region Hub will initially partner with the Nebraska Department of Child and Family Services and at least one additional pilot jurisdiction secured within six months of award. Over the five-year project period, the Hub will expand implementation and learning activities across multiple jurisdictions throughout the Central Region. The project will use Adoption-Share's Family-Match platform, an existing, configurable, web-based decision-support tool that helps child welfare professionals identify, evaluate, and prioritize potential adoptive family opportunities while preserving professional judgment and local decision-making authority. Rather than developing a new technology from the ground up, the project will leverage a proven platform to accelerate implementation, testing, learning, and dissemination activities. The Hub will examine a central question: What do high-quality, technology-enhanced adoption recruitment and matching practices look like, and how can they improve recruitment effectiveness, match quality, timeliness to permanency, placement stability, and adoption outcomes. The project will employ human-centered design, implementation science, continuous quality improvement, and rigorous evaluation methods to support pilot jurisdictions in adopting and effectively using technology-enabled recruitment and matching practices. The Central Region Hub will also advance the field's capacity for secure data sharing, data quality improvement, and interoperability by developing guidance, resources, and best practices that support informed decision-making while protecting privacy and maintaining jurisdictional control of data. Through learning collaboratives, cross-jurisdiction working groups, webinars, toolkits, implementation guides, and other dissemination products, the Central Region Hub will promote shared learning across pilot jurisdictions, other regions, and the broader child welfare field.
