“You guys are just great – I’m not the evaluator but I love evaluation. I love being able to tell the story.” – Eileen Auer Bennet, Executive Director

Assuring Better Child Health & Development (ABCD) was established in Colorado in 2006 to help address the need for healthy development in young children. It’s a statewide nonprofit with a mission to align and mobilize pediatric and community partners to improve early childhood developmental outcomes.

​It’s also the state program lead for HealthySteps, which is the only program of its kind that places a child development specialist within a pediatric primary care team. HealthySteps has demonstrated a myriad of positive outcomes nationally for children, their families, and the practices that serve them, and is a program that ABCD wants to scale here in Colorado knowing the tremendous value it will bring to our communities.

When ABCD first started working with ResultsLab, they were looking for a way to build evidence of the effectiveness of HealthySteps in Colorado, while gathering data to continuously learn and improve from. After participating in ResultsLab’s Impact Accelerator, ABCD walked away with a plan to do just that.

They went through a series of modules where they were able to refine their Theory of Change, develop a program implementation plan, a measurement strategy, refine data collection tools, and create a plan for using data to drive decision making.

By the end of the project, they had the clarity and confidence to not only speak to the intended outcomes of the HealthySteps program, but also the tools and processes in place for sustainable learning and improvement.

“It feels like for the first time we are getting a grasp on the outcome data we have available to us and are able to use it in multiple ways – for potential investment and feedback to sites to let sites know how they are doing.” – Melissa Buchholz, HealthySteps State Director