National Children's Alliance, Inc.

The goal of National Children's Alliance (NCA) is to help ensure that all communities are equipped to provide a coordinated investigation and comprehensive response to child victims of abuse. NCA has been working towards this goal for over 30 years by providing the necessary support, advocacy, and training to sustain and grow the children's advocacy center (CAC) model. CACs are child-focused, facility-based programs with representatives from many disciplines working together (in multi-disciplinary teams, or MDTs) to investigate, prosecute, and treat victims of child abuse. NCA has 10 standards for CAC accreditation that ensure each facility offers consistent, quality services that represent best practices based on the latest evidence. Through NCA's support and leadership, the CAC movement has grown to nearly 800 member CACs; in 2014, CACs served more than 315,000 children across the U.S. Since 2004, more than 2.6 million children have been served by CACs. To ensure that the movement can continue to grow and effectively meet the needs of more children and families, NCA has identified the following strategic goals for the next 3-5 years: 1. Expand access to high-quality CAC services to ensure that every abused child in need of services, regardless of abuse type or ability to pay, can receive the best services available; 2. Improve outcomes for children and that have been harmed by abuse; 3. Continually improve NCA's commitment to organizational excellence; 4. Leverage national partnerships and expand resources to broaden and deepen the impact of our work in protecting and serving child victims; and 5. Create a strong and recognizable brand for NCA/CACs to become the most recognized authority empowering local communities to serve/respond to child victims of abuse.

NCA is in the process of executing the strategies that we believe will enable us to attain our strategic goals. For our first goal of expanding access to CAC services, our strategies are: 1. Identify standards of excellence based on evidence-supported, innovative practices, and to recognize CACs using these practices effectively; 2. Leverage our annual gap analysis—maps illustrating CAC service coverage (areas of the country that have CACs and areas that need CACs) in each state—to identify opportunities for increased coverage; 3. Use client satisfaction and outcome measurement data to improve CAC service quality; and 4. Plan and implement mental health projects for CACs in the use of evidence-supported interventions for all forms of child maltreatment/trauma. To improve outcomes for our clients, we will: 1. Refine our data platforms to collect, analyze, and report on meaningful case and child outcomes; 2. Identify research gaps and partner with researchers in the effort to identify what contributes to positive child outcomes; 3. Build a data-driven culture to inform decisions; and 4. Use data to educate the public and policymakers on the efficacy of the CAC model. To continue and strengthen our support for a growing movement, we will leverage partnerships and expand our resources by: increasing collaboration with key national stakeholders and partner agencies; implementing a plan to engage more corporate partners; and expanding collaborations to include opportunities for health and behavioral health partnerships. We are also working on building a strong, recognizable brand by educating policymakers and the general public about the CAC model, aligning outward-facing messaging to promote positive identification with NCA and CACs, and by delivering effective, evidence-based interventions to victims of child trauma. All of our goals can only be achieved by renewing our commitment to organizational excellence: building infrastructure and aligning our workforce and internal programs with the strategic plan, and increasing funding diversity to ensure long-term sustainability.

NCA is sustained by stable, consistent funding; however, as we expand in new directions, we are pushing ourselves to diversify our funding base. A development team is in place for this purpose, and has succeeded in securing private funding and building new relationships with private funders. In order to satisfy our federal funding requirements, strong fiscal management systems have been developed and are strictly observed. NCA is audited annually by an independent firm and is periodically subject to federal auditing as well. NCA has a lean but growing staff of 20 full-time employees that effectively manages a nationwide network of nearly 800 CACs serving hundreds of thousands of children and families each year. In addition to development, member relations, accreditation, public awareness and grant administration, we also have staff dedicated to advocating for CACs at the state and federal levels, and a new Director of Communications to promote awareness of the important work of NCA and its members and to build capacity within the movement by improving knowledge sharing and broadening the movement's constituency. NCA is also leading the way in expanding the infrastructure and range of mental health services available in CACs across the country. There are currently projects underway in various states to implement new services, such as standardized mental health assessments and evidence-based treatments like the Child and Family Traumatic Stress Intervention (CFTSI). NCA's Board of Directors is composed of seasoned professionals and subject-matter experts from across the child welfare field who are actively engaged in guiding key decision-making processes and ensuring that NCA stays on the leading edge in responding to child abuse in the U.S.

NCA is making encouraging progress towards each of our strategic goals. We have made considerable strides in expanding access to CAC services across the U.S.: in the past 10 years alone, the number of CACs in the U.S. has nearly doubled. There remain, however, many counties without access, particularly in geographically remote areas and on tribal lands. As previously mentioned, NCA uses the Outcome Measurement System to measure client and MDT member satisfaction with CAC services. Today, OMS data is used by 575 CACs to inform decisions and improve services; moreover, OMS benchmark data is being established in each state. We have additionally helped raise the bar for CAC services by updating and revising our Standards of Accreditation to proliferate evidence-supported mental health interventions. We are in the process of implementing mental health-focused projects in CACs in Mississippi, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and are seeking funding to bring these projects to full scale across the US. Pre- and post-trauma scores are being captured for project participants in the Carolinas to measure the impact of this intervention. A key component of our organizational excellence goal is to increase fund diversity. NCA successfully secured private funding for our pilot mental health projects, and we are actively working to cultivate corporate and individual donors as well. NCA staff has grown to accommodate the advocacy needs of Chapters and local CACs, to manage federal partnerships, and to promote wider recognition of and appreciation for the CAC model. We continue to grow our relationships with key partners like the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, the Native American Children's Alliance, and the Yale Child Study Center, leveraging the knowledge and resources gained to continue improving outcomes for the children and families CACs serve. In 2016, we will work to increase public understanding of the important work that NCA and CACs are doing for child victims of abuse. We will also continue to convene workgroups to investigate emerging challenges, such as Commercially Sexually Exploited Children (CSEC), increasing numbers of Children with Sexual Behavior Problems and the recent uptick in cases of physical abuse. As we begin rolling out our first cooperative pilot with the FBI to ask our members to take on responsibility for interviewing and treating child victims of abuse referred by federal agents in addition to those already referred by local and state law enforcement and child welfare agencies, we recognize the need to continue extending partnerships with federal law enforcement and criminal justice partners like the FBI and Homeland Security.