Family Strengthening

Social Capital Valuations (SCV) Principals have extensive experience working with and evaluating Healthy Marriage programs at the national, state, and local grantee levels for over 10 years. “Our experience began as training and technical assistance providers to grantees under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Service’s  Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood grant program.”

SCV’s analysis of Healthy Marriage programs is unique in two ways:  First, we go the extra mile in determining the impact of the programs by researching actual divorce records for couples who have taken part in healthy marriage training, and compare those results against a matched set from a longitudinal database to determine the program’s success rate in terms of divorces avoided. Second, we determine evROI by monetizing that outcome in terms of taxpayer savings for public assistance avoided plus additional taxes collected from higher productivity for parents and children.

The success rate for the marriage strengthening (divorce prevention) programs we analyzed has hovered around 50 percent – meaning that about half of the couples who otherwise were predicted to get divorced, in fact remained married up to five years after taking the marriage strengthening course. The long-term taxpayer evROI ranged between $6.19 and $13.86 dollars per every dollar invested. The higher returns were derived from classes designed for the most at-risk population who came into the course declaring, “We were at our wits end, just holding on.”

Some of our Healthy Marriage program clients include:

• Marriage Works! Ohio (Dayton, Ohio)
• Community Marriage Builders (Evansville, Indiana)
• Anthem Strong Families (Dallas, Texas)