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H. Kay Howard

    About the author

    H. Kay Howard
    As a Manager at Third Sector, H. Kay manages the Empowering Families Learning Community and the Empowering Families projects in Broward County and Massachusetts. Prior to joining Third Sector, H. Kay worked at Civic Consulting Alliance, a public sector consulting firm in Chicago, where she led a project to physically redesign Cook County Central Bond Court in order to promote fairer bond-setting and lower the daily jail population.

    Rapid AssessmentIntroducing a Six-Week Outcomes-Oriented Contracting Workshop Series

    Are you interested in developing systems to improve data-driven decision-making? Do you want to learn more about contracting for positive outcomes? Have you thought about writing outcomes into contracts, but don’t know where to start? Third Sector now offers a workshop-style six-week engagement for state, county, and local government agencies who want to learn about [...]
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    Empowering Young Parent-led Families in Massachusetts to Achieve Economic Mobility

    The data in front of us was sobering: 45% of adults, who received economic assistance under the Massachusetts Transitional Aid to Families with Dependent Children (TAFDC) program in January 2018, had grown up in families that also depended on TAFDC. “We have to do something different to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty,” Commissioner Jeff [...]
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    Process EvaluationAn Intermediate Step to Gauge Outcomes and Expedite the Feedback Loop

    Thanks to innovations in outcomes-focused contracting “because that’s the way we’ve always done it” is no longer an acceptable reason to continue to operate social programs the same way every year hoping for better results. By linking payments to measurable social outcomes, Pay for Success (PFS) contracting has made data and results integral aspects of any social service. Through multi-year randomized control trials (RCTs), which test the outcomes of a PFS project, social service providers and government funders can finally quantify the impact that their programs are making in the

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