The Praed Foundation is a public charitable foundation committed to improving the wellbeing of all through the use of personalized, timely and effective interventions.
About the Foundation
Founded in 1998, the Praed Foundation seeks to support transformational activities in human services, with a special emphasis on improving the lives of children and families. The Foundation has a variety of projects that supports its mission including managing flexible funding for youth with mental health needs in the juvenile justice system. The primary work of the Foundation is in support of a mass collaboration of individuals who seek to use evidence-based assessments as an approach to working together to maintain the focus of human service enterprise on the people they serve. As such, the Praed Foundation maintains the copyrights on the Child & Adolescent Needs and Strengths, the Family Advocacy and Support Tool, the Crisis Assessment Tool, and the Adult Needs and Strengths Assessment to ensure that they remain free for anyone to use who shares this commitment.
TCOM Tools
The Praed Foundation maintains the copyrights on a variety of tools that support TCOM including the Child & Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS), the Family Advocacy and Support Tool (FAST), the Crisis Assessment Tool (CAT), the Adult Needs and Strengths Assessment (ANSA), the Safe Systems Improvement Tool (SSIT), and the Readiness Inventory for Successful Entrepreneurship (RISE). Our goal is to ensure the intellectual integrity of these tools will making them accessible to all who share the goal of helping others.
Communimetrics
Measurement in human services means one thing: how well the effort serves clients. But the data doesn’t exist in a vacuum and must be communicated clearly between provider and client, provider and management, and across systems. During the past decade, innovative communimetric measures have helped more than 50,000 professionals worldwide in health care, justice, and business settings deliver findings that enhance communication on all sides. Now, the theory and methods behind this fast-paced innovation are available in this informative volume.
Communimetrics presents information in an accessible style, and its model of measurement as communication bolsters transparency and ease of interpretation without sacrificing validity or reliability. It conveys a deep appreciation for the unique position of service delivery systems at the intersection between science and management (and between quality and quantity), and shows readers how to create measures that can be used immediately to translate findings into practical action.
This must-have volume offers readers the tools for understanding—and applying—this cutting-edge innovation by providing:
RESEARCH
- The theoretical base for communimetrics.
- Practical illustrations comparing communimetrics with traditional methods.
- Guidelines for designing communimetric measures and evaluating their reliability and validity.
- Detailed examples of three widely used communimetric measures—the Child and Adolescent Needs and Strengths (CANS), the INTERMED, and the Entrepreneurial League System Assessment as well as detailed explanations for how they are used and why they work.
- Applications used in a range of settings, including children’s services, adult mental health, services for the aging, and business and organizational development.

Communimetrics provides a wealth of real-world uses to a wide professional audience, including program evaluators, quality management professionals, enterprise managers, teachers of field research methods, and professionals involved in measurement and management design. It also makes an exceptionally useful text for program evaluation courses