Technical Assistance

Build Your Capacity Better with Evidence-Based Expertise

Leverage Child Trends’ vast experience to solve complex problems, elevate innovative solutions, and improve the well-being of children and families. With decades of research behind us and a focus on creating more equitable outcomes in the future, Child Trends partners with practitioners, governments, and foundations on the local, state, and national levels. Use our technical assistance to integrate research-based practices into your services, build data collection and evaluation capacity, facilitate system and policy change, and develop effective communications.

Child Trends offers technical assistance to support:

Practice improvement
Evaluation
Policy implementation and improvement

We provide technical assistance through:

Knowledge building: To help teams learn about and adopt best practices, Child Trends works collaboratively with technical assistance partners to translate data for policymakers and practitioners and develop tools—such as toolkits, work plans, or exercises—that support their work.
Preparation and planning: Child Trends experts are adept at developing and executing needs assessments, organizational capacity analyses, performance management systems, theories of change, and other foundational components necessary for system or policy change.
Coaching and mentoring: With a deep bench of subject matter and technical assistance experts, Child Trends advises leaders and develops activities that facilitate knowledge and skill sharing among practitioners, policymakers, and other partners. We offer support across three levels of technical assistance: universal (e.g., webinars, professional development), targeted (e.g., communities of practice), and intensive (e.g., one-on-one relationships with groups to achieve a specific goal). Child Trends focuses on sustainability to establish professional supports that build long-term capacity for your sustained improvement.
Evidence-based research-to-practice translation: Child Trends translates research and evidence into relevant, practical tools with easy-to-digest formats to aid professionals who support children, youth, and families. We bring evidence and research to life through, for example, interactive guides, videos, fact sheets and checklists, toolkits, and live and recorded trainings.
Continuous quality improvement: Throughout the life of a project, Child Trends staff collect data, address implementation barriers, and establish feedback loops to inform decisions about necessary enhancements collaboratively with our clients. We help partners optimize services and programs early and often to maximize the potential of meeting their goals.
Incorporating lived experience: Child Trends values and includes people with lived experience—such as youth with lived experience in systems and child- and youth-serving professionals—in our technical assistance activities.

Start with Collaboration

Partner with Child Trends to ensure that your decisions are data-driven so you can implement programs effectively, evaluate outcomes rigorously, and sustain positive impacts over time. Bring together multiple sectors and stakeholders and engage them with culturally responsive approaches to knowledge sharing to reach those who can benefit most from technical assistance. Our support is customized to meet your exact needs at every step along the journey.

Bring in Experts

From improving equitable access to services and supports to utilizing a research-to-practice model, our experts help you foster innovation, track the impact of funding, and bolster your capacity to improve the well-being of children and families. We work with individual programs focused on community change and manage multi-million-dollar federal technical assistance centers. If you’re working in education, health, child care, child welfare, or community building, we can help you work smarter.

ChildTrends

12300 Twinbrook Parkway Suite 235 Rockville MD 20852

240.223.9200