The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). It oversees many of the human services programs administered by the Department, including child welfare programs and services, the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, Head Start, Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood (HMRF) grants, anti-poverty programs, and Runaway and Homeless Youth (RHY) programs, among many others. These programs provide resources and supports to help ensure safe, permanent family or family connections for children, parents find jobs, young children are ready for school, committed partners build resilient partnerships, communities thrive, and teens who may be unstably or unsafely housed get connected to supportive adults and environments so they can flourish. In total, ACF administers more than 60 programs with a budget of more than $62 billion, making it the second largest division in HHS.

The purpose of this Sources Sought Notice is twofold:

1. To identify contractors who have capabilities and experience in using equitable approaches to research, evaluation, related data practices, and evaluation technical assistance.


2. To learn if there are aspects of OPRE’s typical procurement processes or practices that have unintentionally created challenges to small businesses in responding to OPRE solicitations and gather recommendations to overcome these challenges

In addition to providing information about your capabilities, this Sources Sought Notice poses the following questions:

1. Are there aspects of OPRE procurements that may be challenging for your business to successfully respond to, including but not limited to, format, response instructions, timelines, forecasting, bidding assumptions, and contract requirements? Which of these, if any, impact your decision to submit a proposal?
   
   
   
   1. To give you a sense of OPRE procurements, how they are written, and the kinds of information they ask for, please see examples of recent procurements such as -
      
      
      
      1. Advancing Contextual Analysis and Methods of Participant Engagement (CAMPE),
      
      
      2. Employment Processes as Barriers to Employment in the Lower-Wage Labor Market,
      
      
      3. Financing for ECE Quality and Access for All (F4EQ)
      
      
      4. Race Equity for Fatherhood, Relationship, and Marriage Programs to Empower Black Families (REFRAME),
      
      
      5. Understanding and Expanding the Reach of Home Visiting (HV-REACH).
      
      
      
      
   
   
   
   


2. Does your company have the capability to support Cost Plus Fixed Fee (CPFF) type contracts? What, if any, problems would your company have in supporting the contract administration of a CPFF type contract?


3. What recommendations do you have for making the bidding process more equitable and accessible to small business, disadvantaged vendors?


4. What recommendations do you have for pre-proposal engagement with the industry, such as requests for information, sources sought notices, pre-solicitation conferences, industry days, etc.? How do these activities affect your decision to bid on a requirement?


5. One of the ways in which OPRE is seeking to incorporate more racially equitable approaches is by having contractors provide staffing that is representative of the diversity of the populations participating in our research and evaluation projects, including staff who may have had direct experience of ACF programs and staff who have cultural competence in working with populations served by ACF programs. Have you experienced any challenges in providing staffing with this kind of lived expertise and/or cultural competence on federal projects?


6. What are some areas in which you think your business has innovative capabilities and experience that would benefit OPRE procurements? How can OPRE structure its procurements to better encourage innovation, creativity, and new solutions?

Capability statement requirements

To learn more about your organization’s capabilities to use more equitable approaches in research, evaluation, related data practices, and evaluation technical assistance, please provide information regarding your organization’s capabilities to do and experiences with any of the following:

• Experience in conducting equitable evaluations, equitable analyses, or incorporating data equity throughout the data lifecycle.


• Human centered designed, or other approaches that center the end-user or perspective of those affected by the program and/or research.


• Providing staffing that includes staff with lived expertise of ACF (or other federal benefit) programs and/or staff who are culturally competent in working with communities served by ACF programs.


• Taking into account how structural racism (or other inequities) has affected populations of interest as well as the services and programs with which they interact (for example, histories of residential segregation or historical provision of adequate public resources).


• Designing research efforts to permit disaggregating data in ways that are meaningful to the research questions being addressed, do not harm marginalized communities (e.g., reinforce stereotypes, violate privacy), and help develop a better understanding of different populations’ experiences and outcomes – enabling identification of which groups are benefitting the most, which are benefitting the least, and which may experience unintended consequences.


• Involving, throughout the entirety of a process, members of groups most impacted by the programs or issues being studied and doing so in ways that acknowledge past harms, build trust, recognize and elevate group members’ expertise, and ensure accountability.


• Equitably recruiting members of a community and co-designing projects together.


• Using culturally responsive approaches that recognize and address the impacts of different aspects of identity and different statuses on research and evaluation activities.


• Sharing findings and data with groups and individuals invested in program outcomes in an accessible way, including making data available for additional research (as feasible).


• Organizational efforts to maintain cultural humility, accountability, and a continuous learning mindset while performing research, data support, and evaluation.


• Areas of experience that your business currently has and may be particularly adept at filling.