In June 2003, The Pew Charitable Trusts initiated support for the Children and Family Research Center at the School of Social Work, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign through a grant to the University of Illinois Foundation to launch a public education and outreach campaign called Fostering Results. The campaign worked at the national level and in selected states to highlight the need to address the federal financing mechanisms that favor foster care over other services and options for children and families and to improve court oversight of child welfare cases. The grant was part of a multi-year, three part policy initiative by The Pew Charitable Trusts designed to help move children in foster care more quickly and appropriately to safe, permanent families and prevent the unnecessary placement of children in foster care. Click here for additional information about this initiative. Fostering Results engaged key constituencies, including influential national and local leaders, judges, child welfare directors and caseworkers, and advocates for youth and foster, birth and adoptive families, using media, reports and meetings to call attention to the financing and court issues at the heart of the foster care system recommendations crafted by the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care. The Trusts and Fostering Results along with numerous states and national partners helped spearhead the campaign's activities.

In 2006, The Pew Charitable Trusts, in collaboration with the State Justice Institute and Barton Foundation provided support for a new initiative called Fostering Court Improvemnt. Fostering Court Improvement (FCI) combines child welfare data expertise developed at Emory University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to convert the existing semiannualAdoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System (AFCARS) data submissions into a longitudinal picture of the system that is statistically sound and infinitely useful. The initiative will be housed at Emory University. Dr. Mark Testa of Fostering Results at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign School of Social Work, the Honorable Nancy Salyers of Fostering Results, and Andy Barclay of the Barton Child Law and Policy Clinic at Emory University School of Law will lead the project.

In 2004 the American Bar Association Center on Children and the Law, the National Center for State Courts, and the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges issued "Building a Better Court," a publication outlining recommended court performance and judicial workload measures. The court performance measures cover four basic outcomes: 1) safety, 2) permanency, 3) due process, and 4) timeliness. Courts are now expected to find the means to measure and track these performance measures. Improved analysis of AFCARS as done in the FCI project provides courts with readily available data for a portion of these performance measures. FCI posts the longitudinal AFCARS files on a website that is broken out by county which can often be mapped to judicial circuits and child welfare regions. Information for the entire state’s performance is also available. The data on the website show every comparison imaginable both within and across jurisdictions. Using this longitudinal AFCARS data set, the courts have the benefit of a nationally recognized and endorsed system of court performance measures. FCI provides the courts and child welfare agency with shared data that enable both entities to track their performance, thereby enabling improved outcomes for children by addressing areas in need of improvement.