Growth in Accredited Children's Homes

Margie Christopher, executive director of Children's Homes of Cleveland County, led the accreditation effort to help her agency meet high standards and achieve best practices to better serve children.

To promote higher standards and consistent quality among children's homes, The Duke Endowment changed its grantmaking strategy to provide support only to children's homes with national accreditation from one of three recognized accrediting bodies.

Insights

This fairly simple process of emphasizing accreditation yielded some significant insights.

• Simply going through the accreditation process helps children's homes recognize areas for ongoing improvement. By promoting accreditation, the Endowment is supporting a movement toward higher standards.
• Although the Endowment believes that accreditation can improve performance, it also realizes that accreditation does not guarantee quality. Recognizing areas for improvement does not mean a children's home automatically has the ability to make such improvements. And, regrettably, there are incidences where accredited children's homes have failed to deliver high-quality service. But accreditation, at the very least, gives a solid benchmark for evaluating the performance of children's homes relative to the industry as a whole.
• Accrediting bodies must be evaluated carefully. Some national accrediting bodies function also as quasi-membership organizations. This can create a conflict of interest if accrediting bodies value potential revenue streams resulting from accreditation more than the standards they promote.

Impact

In less than 10 years, the number of nationally accredited children's homes in North Carolina and South Carolina grew significantly. (Two have subsequently lost their accreditation.) The Duke Endowment believes that this initiative also raised expectations for performance and accreditation among other membership organizations to which children's homes belong, such as Benchmarks. The North Carolina Division of Mental Health, effective 2009, also will provide accreditation for children's homes that offer treatment interventions.

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Associate Director of Child Care
704.969.2117