Minnesota Child Welfare Research Collaborative (MCWRC)

The mission of MCWRC is: 

We aim to promote child well-being by creating an interdisciplinary body of research focused on education and health of youth (co-occurrence/ common causes and consequences) in Minnesota by combing data and other institutional resources.

The key members of the Minnesota Child Welfare Research Collaborative (MCWRC), initiated through grant support from the University of Minnesota Children, Youth and Family Consortium and the School of Public Health at the University of Minnesota, includes representatives from the University of Minnesota, the Minnesota Departments of Education, Health and Public Safety and Hennepin County with expertise ranging from social epidemiology, youth risk behaviors and resilience, crime and juvenile justice and managing large data sets. This is significant because as we forge new cross-disciplinary and inter-agency partnerships, we have the capacity to merge administrative data sets across systems providing information to policy makers, researchers and practitioners on ways to improve child well-being in Minnesota.

Opportunities are available for collaborative research and student internships or projects. Please review the information on who we are and where we work. Feel free to contact either Dr. Hearst or Dr. Oakes or any of the individual partners listed.

Why We’re Here

“The Children Youth Family Consortium’s focuses on the intersection of education and health disparities, which is exactly the issue that got MCWRC started in the first place. From this [MCWRC] collaborative we hope to aid in the promotion of research that focused on the intersection of education and health disparities.” - Cathy Jordan

“I look at it as a refreshingly broad venue and multidisciplinary group of people meeting to discuss social problems in a research-oriented way. People…don’t realize the ways all of our child welfare work is connected. MCWRC has created a space for that rich multidisciplinary dialogue, exploration, and sharing of ideas to occur around the topic of child welfare and social problems.” – Anita Larson

“MCWRC is an effort to build relationships. Why? Because the idea is that all research is relationships; whether it be with grant funders, with the IRB, with current researchers, etc., relationships are key.” – Michael Oakes

“The Department of Education, where I work, is seeking to build better partnerships to further research related to youth, as well as to use our data more effectively.” – Ali Anfinson

“[Through MCWRC] I hope to strengthen relationships with community and state partners. Together, we can design research that has greater relevance to the missions of community organizations and state agencies and greater real-world application.” – Sonya Brady

“Through being on MCWRC, I’ve learned about MinnLInk. MinnLInk has opened up a lot of possibilities about how you can link….data together so that we have education data, child welfare data, and human services data, all together in one accessible location.” - Peter Rode

“Through MCWRC I’ve been able to pull people in on projects. I’ve been able to share ideas, meet people, have access to data sets, etc. I’ve also gotten grants with MCWRC partners.”   – Toben Nelson

“The main product of MCWRC has been the unique development of relationships between different faculty and different state agencies, which otherwise would not normally occur as it isn’t the norm for such people to collaborate.” – Cathy Jordan