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In This Issue
Dr. James L. Curtis
Program Evaluation Group
Mental Health Overlooked in Rural America
Postdoctoral Fellowship
Dr. James L. Curtis

The Vivian A. and James L. Curtis School of Social Work Research and Training Center  was created in 2007 in honor and recognition of the generous support of Vivian A. Curtis  (1948 U-M School of Social Work graduate)  and Dr. James L. Curtis  (1946 U-M Medical School graduate).  

 

Vivian, a U-M SSW alumna held faculty appointments at many of New York's major universities and spent 46 years at Kings County Hospital.  
James, a U-M Medical School graduate, retired in 2000 after nearly 20 years as director of psychiatry at Harlem Hospital.   

 




The U-M School of Social Work research transforms social work practice by attacking complex social problems, shaping policies and inspiring new generations of researchers.

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Welcome
The Curtis Center collaborates with faculty members, students, University and community partners to create social change through research and evaluation excellence.  The Center is the research incubator and evaluation training center at the U-M School of Social Work. 
 
The Center focuses on underserved populations and aligns itself with the belief that "The true measure of a society's worth is how it treats its most vulnerable individuals."  

 

Center research support services include expert individual and team research consultations from early conceptual phase to post funding.  Research support services also include a pilot grant program supporting innovative early-stage projects, postdoctoral fellowships, research workgroup support, educational programming and doctoral research awards.  
  
The Curtis Center program evaluation group is training lab for students focused on program evaluation science while meeting community need for evaluation services. The program evaluation group and the research support activities work together toward a common aim to make meaningful discoveries that improve the lives of people in need.
  

I invite you to browse our newsletter and collaborate with the Curtis Center to create social change through research and evaluation excellence.

 

Joseph Himle, Ph.D.

Director, The Vivian A. and James L. Curtis School of Social Work Research and Training Center, Associate Professor of Social Work, School of Social Work and Associate Professor of Psychiatry, Medical School, University of Michigan 

 

Program Evaluation Group 
Anyone working in nonprofit, government or social services quickly learns the importance of high quality program evaluation.  Solid evaluations shape budgets, illustrate return on investment, demonstrate customer satisfaction and are crucial to the long range planning process. However, many organizations do not have in-house expertise in evaluation. 

 

The Curtis Center program evaluation group offers evaluation services through a training partnership with MSW graduate students interested in program evaluation careers.  

 

The group is comprised of experts in community-based evaluation, including Clinical Assistant Professor and Program Evaluation Director, Sue Ann Savas, and Program Evaluation Associate Director, John Seeley.  MSW graduates and students work with faculty members to plan and conduct program evaluations on project teams.

 

The Program Evaluation Group collects and analyzes information so clients can make informed decisions, improve program effectiveness, and efficiencies.  The Group specializes in:

  • Program design
  • Logic modeling
  • Evaluation planning, budgeting
  • Implementation and fidelity evaluation
  • Outcome measurement and reporting

 For more information or to schedule a consultation contact: [email protected] 

 

Mental Health Overlooked and Ignored in Rural America

  

Addie Weaver with Pastor Mark from the Church of the Nazarene in Hillsdale Michigan. 

 

 

 

 

 

View Slideshow

 

Principal Investigators: Addie Weaver, Curtis Center Postdoctoral Fellow 

Mentors: Joseph Himle, Deborah Bybee, Marcia Valenstein, Amy Kilbourne, Robert Taylor, and Robert Glueckauf  

Pending Grant Proposal:  National Institute of Mental Health


Living and working in rural communities can present a variety of distinct stresses and strains. Rural Americans are as likely to experience mental illness as their urban counterparts, yet they are less likely to receive any type of mental health treatment.


Addie Weaver, Curtis Center Postdoctoral Fellow (2011-13), has been working to improve access to mental health services for people living in rural areas using innovative intervention delivery methods. 
 
Addie has a particular interest in decreasing barriers people living in rural areas face and much of her work focuses on adapting the delivery of evidence-based mental health services in non-traditional human service settings. Addie's practice and research experiences in rural communities led her to identify churches as a logical setting for providing mental health treatment. A Curtis Center pilot project assessing the feasibility and acceptability of church-based depression treatment allowed Addie to conduct preliminary work necessary to justify a pending NIMH career development KO1 application that would support this intervention research.

Addie explains, "Churches remain the heart of many rural communities and people living in rural areas look to the church and clergy for social and emotional support. Church-based health and mental health interventions have been successfully implemented in other underserved, disadvantaged communities whose members also face access and stigma-related barriers to care. To me, church settings offer a promising opportunity to bring needed evidence-based treatments to underserved rural communities as well."  

 

Re-tooling Michigan's Child Support Enforcement Program

Many Michigan parents find meeting child support obligations too difficult, yet the financial difference child support payments can make is sometimes all that keeps families and children out of poverty. The Curtis Center Program Evaluation Group has been conducting a 3-year evaluation of the State of Michigan's Child Support Program. The aim of the project is to increase the financial well-being of children and families by increasing the effectiveness of the child support collection process.

 

"We are very pleased to be partnering with the University of Michigan School of Social Work to improve our services when it comes to enforcement of child support court orders," says Erin P. Frisch, the Michigan Office of Child Support Title IV-D Director. "With this knowledge, Michigan will be able to help parents overcome difficulties in making child support payments. By eliminating or reducing obstacles that impair payment of child support, we hope to also improve family relationships between parents and their children.

 

We look forward to the University's evaluation of two pilot projects, which will assist Michigan's child support program in determining new approaches to improve the financial and emotional well being of Michigan's children and helping us to achieve our vision of engaging parents to improve children's lives."

 

The project builds on child support enforcement research conducted in other states and on national best practices. The group has been invited to present preliminary results of a new pilot-tested cost-effective collection at the Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management (APPAM) Fall Research conference in Washington, D.C. in November 2013.

Curtis Center Postdoctoral Fellowship

 

Since 2009 the Curtis Center has been training promising academicians to assume leadership roles in research, evaluation, teaching, and service.  Selected fellows partner with a U-M SSW faculty mentor continuing their own research agenda and joining new projects in the School and across campus.  Training at The Center for Statistical Consultation and Research and many other opportunities for interdisciplinary learning and collaborative projects throughout the University.  

 

Curtis Center Postdoctoral Fellows:

2013-2014: Jinyu Liu, PhD, University of Iowa
2013-2014: Elizabeth Thomason, PhD, University of Michigan 
2011-2013: Addie Weaver, PhD, University of Pittsburgh
2009-2011: Cristina Bares, PhD, Assistant Professor, Virginia                      Commonwealth University