What an Independent Evaluation Found About Safe & Together Training in Ohio

When the HealthPath Foundation of Ohio wanted to know whether Safe & Together™ training was changing how child welfare workers handled domestic violence cases, it didn’t rely on internal reporting—it funded an independent evaluation, competitively bid out to Measurement Resources, Inc. and Galade Research & Project Management, drawing on five separate data sources across 27 counties.

Caseworkers who completed the training became measurably less likely to blame victims for staying in a violent relationship, and case files showed documentation of how domestic violence affects children nearly double—from 50% of relevant files before training to 80% after. Supervisors described a real shift in mindset: one told evaluators, “Before we would have put the blame on Mom versus trying to partner with her and create a plan.”

Some outcomes—including deeper engagement with perpetrators and written policy change—showed more inconsistent results across the study’s data sources. The evaluators’ own read is that shifts like these plausibly take longer to surface than the one- to four-month window their study could observe, and they recommend follow-up evaluation built around that longer timeline.