Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) Collaborative on Capacity Building and Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI)

The Office of Community Services (OCS) within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) plans to issue a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for a Community Services Block Grant (CSBG) Collaborative on Capacity Building and Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI). This Collaborative will reinforce and respond to OCS's mission of reducing poverty, revitalizing low-income communities, and empowering low-income families, individuals, and communities. The CQI Collaborative's primary purpose will be to work with CSBG state associations to develop and enhance coordination efforts with CSBG State Lead Agencies that effectively prioritizes and coordinates training and technical assistance resources. The CQI Collaborative's efforts will enhance, align, leverage, promote and establish best practices and innovative strategies for utilizing a coordinated training and technical assistance framework for spurring and sustaining results-based poverty reduction strategies, economic growth, and pathways out of poverty. The CQI Collaborative will explicitly reinforce the importance of addressing the multiple and interrelated needs of families in low-income communities, communities of color, rural and tribal communities. The CQI Collaborative will concentrate on identifying and implementing emerging, promising, and best practices through an understanding of effective coordination frameworks and strategies, organizational capacity building, implementation research, peer learning, and quality continuous quality improvement practices. The CQI Collaborative will be funded through a cooperative agreement. The cooperative agreement will require a close working partnership with OCS as well as closely collaborating and coordinating with each CSBG state association. The CQI Collaborative will implement regional and statewide training and technical assistance (T/TA) consistent with the purposes of CSBG. T/TA, provided with OCS leadership review and approval, will include the development of peer-to-peer strategies and materials such as webinars, training modules, podcasts, presentations, and other learning and capacity building activities on emerging, promising, and best practices in poverty reduction, effective CQI practices, rapid-cycle learning, using data to inform policies and practice, peer learning, and coordinated implementation and capacity-building strategies.