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Included in the OhioKAN core components are the core implementation supports deemed essential for successful implementation of the OhioKAN program model. Such supports are essential to creating an enabling context where OhioKAN’s practices can be implemented and produce the program’s intended outcomes. The NIRN Active Implementation Frameworks defines an enabling context as the environment and setting needed for effective practices to be used well. The Active Implementation Frameworks specify improvement cycles and linked implementation teams as essential to creating an enabling context 60 .

OhioKAN’s Core Implementation Supports are designed to make explicit the activities needed to ensure the program is implemented in an environment conducive to its success. A continuous quality improvement cycle which includes opportunities for staff at all levels to participate is essential to the program’s success. Furthermore, community service and support mapping and community outreach and capacity building are key activities implementation teams must attend to when implementing OhioKAN.

Each of these supports enable the successful implementation of OhioKAN by providing both technical and adaptive solutions to challenges faced both at the community level and family level. Kinnect chose a specific method, such as the OhioKAN Information Hub, to address each of these core implementation supports. Jurisdictions can choose to customize their approach when implementing OhioKAN to the context of the circumstances and possible existing infrastructure of the implementing agency.

Continuous quality improvement promotes a culture of learning and engagement of staff at all levels in making programmatic and practice improvements to achieve outcomes for kinship and adoptive families. Dedicated CQI meetings provide the opportunity to those that are delivering the service to give feedback about their experience to in turn further enhance the successful implementation of the program model. Such spaces intentionally provide time to discuss trends, identify barriers and service gaps, find solutions to practice challenges, conduct small tests of change, regularly review the inclusion, diversity, equity, and access framework and to disaggregate data by key demographic characteristics. The organization's leadership promotes a culture that values ongoing reflection of service quality and continual efforts by the full agency, its partners, and contractors. The infrastructure that supports effective CQI is critical to identify places for improvement, critically reflect and incorporate feedback from all staff levels to implement solutions that improve both practice and fidelity to the program model for achievement of outcomes for kinship and adoptive families.

• Methods for ensuring fidelity to the model
• Methods for feedback of satisfaction from consumers
• Methods for measuring outcomes and impact of services

Comprehensive community service and support mapping provides a critical mechanism for OhioKAN staff to match the needs of families with available resources in the community. Specifically, ensuring there is a searchable index of resources that can be updated as information changes is a key activity implementation teams must ensure is completed before service delivery begins. This index should be categorized by BASICS domain and include location and contact information for each service or support. This service and support map is utilized to identify resources and to develop a referral binder, an essential element of the Connect Level of Service. In addition, developing a process for the assessment of the existing service array and ongoing identification of service gaps and barriers play a key role in both providing targeted resources to families and achieving outcomes on the community pathway of the OhioKAN theory of change, which includes the awareness of and support in filling community service gaps.

Localized community outreach and capacity building activities are focused on reducing stigma around support seeking behaviors and normalizing a variety of family constellations that often makeup the kinship and adoptive families served by the OhioKAN program. Multidisciplinary stakeholders regularly convene to build awareness and knowledge within the communities and across disciplines about the unique strengths, challenges, and needs of kinship and adoptive families and best practices for serving them. Implementation teams are responsible for designing structures and processes that are tailored to the jurisdiction’s context.

• 60National Implementation Research Network (NIRN). Active Implementation Frameworks. (2005). Retrieved from: https://nirn.fpg.unc.edu/sites/nirn.fpg.unc.edu/files/resources/AIHub%2…