Supporting Best Starts for Kids Through Evaluation and Capacity Building

Over the last few years, Cardea has worked with Best Starts for Kids and its community partners on a variety of initiatives. Best Starts is a voter-approved initiative in King County, Washington that is centered on a philosophy of promotion, prevention, early intervention, and policy and systems change, with a focus on place and race.

Across these initiatives, we are working in partnership with Best Starts and more than 60 community-based organizations to provide social impact evaluation and capacity development, creating theories of change and logic models, evaluation systems and tools/processes, project indicators and data sources; collecting baseline and project data; and producing multiple dissemination products.

Examples of initiatives that we are honored to support include…

• A series of evaluation case studies that documented five key themes critical to Best Starts partners: 1) Leading with Equity; 2) Centering Culture and Language; 3) Supporting Communities that Thrive; 4) Building Organizational & Community Strength; and 5) Working to Transform Policies, Systems, & Environments
• Two participatory landscape analyses—one to better understand successes, gaps, and disparities around developmental screening, referral, and connection to services in King County and one to assess outcomes of current models for providing Early Support for Infant and Toddler (ESIT) services to children residing in out-of home care and/or who is with a parent/caregiver receiving services in the child welfare system and how systems can better support and engage parents and families, centering the experiences of Black and Indigenous children and families
• An evaluation of capacity development for community-based organizations to support the creation of well-designed, culturally responsive programs; strengthen equity-informed data collection and use; build equitable and effective organizational practices; and engage community voices in systems design

Visit our Approach & Services page to learn more about our social impact evaluation and capacity development work.