Speaker: Sharon Kollar
Please briefly describe your project win (a sentence or two if you can!). Tell us the project name, who it's for, and what the work entails.
Sharon Kollar: Hi. Uh I'm here to tell you about the National Child Welfare Center for Innovation and Advancement. This is a five year technical assistance center. It's funded through the Federal Children's Bureau which is part of the Department of Health and Human Services. We are a sub to J BS International and we'll also be partnering with um Deloitte and with the Center for Children and Family Futures. The objectives of this contract is to improve public child welfare agencies and their ability to meet federally funded program requirements to help as they participate in mandatory service planning and monitoring reviews. It's uh as the Children's Bureau has said really the center is supposed is expected to be a national leader in providing training and technical assistance supports to public child welfare agencies. Um And we really expect to be able to uh impact practice across all 50 states at Mathematica. We're integrated into the leadership team. So I will serve as the associate director for the entire center. We will also lead the CQ I evaluation and OMB clearance tasks. In addition, uh we will be using our expertise to advance service delivery through tailored services to states marketing and dissemination, peer networking and product development. The details of that are all um yet to be worked out with J BS. There is a catch to this one. We are uh under protest. The current incumbent is protesting that they lost this contract. Um And so we are on hold, but we're waiting for this to be resolved and we're really hopeful that it will be resolved quickly.
Tell us why you're excited about it!
Sharon Kollar: So why am I excited about this project? Um I'm excited because for one, it brought me here to Mathematica and I'll get to work with many of you. I have also spent the last 15 years in a leadership role at the National Child Welfare Workforce Institute. And I can see the ways that the Children's Bureau is creating this new center to build on a lot of the work that I did there. And I'm excited to bring that into this new center into uh our work at Mathematica. I'm really passionate about transforming the child welfare system and this is an amazing opportunity for us to partner with the Children's Bureau, to partner with State Child Welfare Agencies to really transform practice and help them as they're working to become more equitable and just organizations. I see that desire in them. And I'm excited for us to be a part of that. I also see this as a way to really concretely tie to our mission and to improve public well being and for mathematics to, to grow in the programmatic T A space
