- Hilary Shager, Molly Costanzo, Lisa Klein Vogel, Alexis Dennis, Yonah Drazen, Hanna Han, Samina Hossain, and Liesl Hostetter
- March 2025
- Link to WI-ELEVATE-final-evaluation-report (PDF)
In 2019, the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families (DCF) provided funding, via a waiver from the federal Office of Child Support Services (OCSS) to five Wisconsin counties, to test an innovative approach to serving families involved in the child support system. This program, called ELEVATE (Empowering Lives through Education, Vocational Assessment, Training, and Employment), originated from a previous OCSS-funded national demonstration project, the National Child Support Noncustodial Parent Employment Demonstration (CSPED), in which Wisconsin piloted projects in Brown and Kenosha counties under the title Supporting Parents Supporting Kids (SPSK). Like SPSK, ELEVATE provided a package of services to noncustodial parents (NCPs) behind on their child support obligations, in lieu of more traditional, enforcement-oriented approaches. This report summarizes findings from the ELEVATE evaluation, including a quasi-experimental impact analysis, which analyzes the program’s impacts on employment and child support payment outcomes using state administrative data, as well as information about how the programs operated via an implementation analysis, analysis of services data, and interviews with ELEVATE participants.
Categories
Child Support, Employment, Enforcement, Unemployment/Nonemployment
Tags
Administrative Data, Implementation Study, Noncustodial Parents/NCP, Qualitative Research, Quantitative Research, Quasi-Experimental Design, Wisconsin