EVIDENCE-BASED POLICYMAKING: Family Success Lab
The problem: New Mexico works in silos to address problems that exist across systems—only treating the symptoms of poverty and not the root causes.
Despite all best and well-intentioned efforts by government and philanthropy, too many New Mexican families are unable to escape the inter-generational effects of poverty. All of New Mexico Appleseed's work uses a multi-dimensional lens to address the complex root causes of poverty.
Ample research shows that many symptoms of vulnerable families are causal and/or correlated. For instance, a child's lack of stable housing is a risk factor for child neglect. Food insecurity is a risk factor for low educational outcomes. The correlations are too many to list, but critical to recognize if you want to understand and address the needs of New Mexico's most vulnerable families.
Family Success Lab at the New Mexico Department of Health
Addressing the policy challenge (and solution) to multi-system-involved children and families. The vast majority of New Mexico’s social services system is based on triage with no ability to predict and prevent problems. A hospital social worker cannot know that a baby is at higher risk of being abused, for example, if he does not know that the baby’s family is homeless. A school counselor cannot know that a fourth grade child is at high risk for mental health problems, if she does not know that the child’s father is in prison. The lack of coordination of data that tells a child’s whole set of circumstances means that funding, policymaking and service provision is rarely (and randomly) effective.
Appleseed created the Family Success Lab (FSL) at the NM Department of Health (DOH) to use linked administrative data to discover and deploy evidence-based, data-informed and scalable solutions to common challenges facing vulnerable children and families. Linked data offers significantly more granularity in understanding key risk factors for poor outcomes and evaluating programs. It helps identify risk and protective factors to better assess family strengths and challenges, target evidence-based programs to high-risk groups, and evaluate programs, policies, and interventions for efficacy and cost.
In 2020-21 Appleseed secured legislative funding for a full-time position for the FSL at the DOH. We spearheaded the creation of a research agenda to study cross-agency and cross-generation correlations at DOH and the NM Early Childhood Education and Care Department (ECECD). The FSL is currently looking at questions regarding the impact of home visitation programs on:
preventing abuse and neglect referrals
enrollment in high-quality pre-K
maternal depression
improve outcomes for other children in the household