CE25-025 - Promising Futures: Healing-centered systems to prevent adverse childhood experiences

The Family Violence Prevention and Services Act (FVPSA)-funded Promising Futures initiative strengthens organizational capacity among community agencies to support families impacted by intimate partner violence (IPV). This proposed study will evaluate the impact of adding training and technical assistance (TTA) in healing- centered systems integration (All In For Kids model, AIFK) on reducing child abuse and neglect (CAN), IPV, and parental mental health conditions. This proposal responds to the call for rigorous evaluation of community- level primary prevention approaches to prevent adverse childhood experiences (RFA-CE-25-025), specifically, existing primary prevention approaches that address community-level conditions and strengthen economic supports to families (Research Objective 3). Since 2016, Promising Futures, a project of Futures Without Violence (FUTURES, national non-profit violence prevention organization), has provided support to a network of IPV state coalitions, local community-based programs, and other child-serving systems on enhancing services for families impacted by IPV. Opportunity to drive systemic change is hampered by siloing of systems, few incentives for cross-sector collaboration, limited involvement of community members in designing solutions, and challenges in collating and using shared data and metrics to monitor progress. To address these challenges, All In For Kids (AIFK), also a project of FUTURES, focuses on healing-centered systems integration to design responsive healing and caring early childhood ecosystems across health, education, and community sectors. AIFK promotes systems-level changes to sustain services, policies, and practices that result in holistic well-being across generations including strengthening economic supports to families. The proposed study will evaluate addition of AIFK healing-centered systems-transformation TTA with existing Promising Futures sites as a primary prevention approach to prevent ACEs. The research team has expertise in cross-sector collaboration, implementation science, community-partnered evaluation, healing-centered engagement, and science of thriving. This team will lead evaluation of the effectiveness of adding systems integration training via the AIFK model with Promising Futures grantees compared to matched grantees receiving usual support on CAN, IPV, parent mental health conditions, child thriving, and connectivity of early childhood ecosystems (Aim 1). The team will document implementation processes using qualitative and quantitative methods (Aim 2). With site leads and community partners, the team will disseminate lessons learned about use of community-led systems design to envision ideal structures, implement cross-sector solutions with measurable results, and improve prevention of ACEs (Aim 3).