Faith-Based Organizations and Veteran Reintegration: Enriching the Web of Support.

Faith-based organizations (FBOs) are an important community-based resource for veterans as they readjust to civilian life. Through interviews with both national-level and smaller, local FBOs, the authors sought to understand better the current and potential roles for FBOs in veteran reintegration. Interviewees suggested that veterans may look to FBOs for support because they offer privacy and confidentiality, two features that may be especially critical when a potential stigma is involved. Some FBOs have also developed a reputation as safe places for veterans, providing supportive, judgment-free environments. FBOs not only help veterans with spiritual matters but address diverse areas of veteran health and wellness, including vocation, education, financial and legal stability, shelter, access to goods and services, mental health, access to health care, physical health, family, and social networks. In some cases, the support is offered to veterans directly; in other instances, the support is indirect, via training individuals to help veterans or educating the public about them. In the process of providing support, FBOs interact with varied organizations, including government entities, private nonprofits, and one another, for training, outreach, referrals, information exchange, obtaining donations, and collaboration. Yet challenges exist, including insufficient connections with chaplains working in different settings and others in the web of support, resource and capacity constraints, lack of awareness of experience with veterans, issues related to religious philosophy or orientation, and characteristics of veterans themselves. To move forward, the authors offer recommendations for policymakers, organizations that interact with FBOs, and FBOs themselves to help FBOs engage fully in the web of reintegration support.

Process Evaluation of the New Mexico Maternal, Infant, and Early Childhood Home Visiting Competitive Development Grant.

This article describes the evaluation of the New Mexico Home Visiting Competitive Development Grant, which sought to pilot test the use of implementation supports to improve the development and implementation of home visiting programs. Each community was to use Getting To Outcomes® (GTO) and ECHO® (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) to support their work. The GTO framework promotes capacity for high-quality programming by specifying ten steps that practitioners should take and by providing support to complete those steps. ECHO involves specialists providing training and technical assistance via distance technology to community practitioners in rural areas to improve the quality of services. The grant was delayed, and the project's scope shifted significantly from the original plan. The evaluation documents significant challenges in meeting grant goals. A local team hired to facilitate GTO did not use it as designed, and no communities were trained in GTO. The coalitions that were developed operated with few resources or accountability, and made little progress on plans to enhance services. Only two of the four communities started home visiting after nearly a year and a half. ECHO was used with fidelity with those two programs. There was no change in the continuum of services to support children and families. Due to delays and lack of implementation of the proposed intervention, the evaluation was not able to assess the project's impact on child or family outcomes, nor did the project serve as a robust pilot test of the use of GTO and ECHO to improve home visiting implementation.

Measuring enactment of innovations and the factors that affect implementation and sustainability: moving toward common language and shared conceptual understanding.

This article describes research that focuses on the concern that researchers are unable to fully realize the potential value of their collective efforts because they do not have shared conceptual or operational tools for communicating assumptions, ideas, research strategies, or findings with others outside, or even within their disciplines. This research, through the lens of measuring implementation of educational programs, has taken steps toward bringing researchers' varied pictures of understanding into a coherent landscape. This article describes a conceptual framework for describing aspects of implementation, a conceptual framework for describing the factors that affect implementation, and tools for measuring each. It describes the challenges addressed in the development of these approaches, and the application of these approaches to current studies in education and other fields in the social sciences. In doing so, it demonstrates that meaningful communication between researchers and accumulation of knowledge across fields is possible, and necessary.