October 2018Vol. 19, No. 8Print issueSpotlight on Community-Based Primary Prevention

Issue Spotlight

• Special Journal Issue Highlights the Public Health Model of Child Maltreatment Prevention

  Special Journal Issue Highlights the Public Health Model of Child Maltreatment Prevention

  Child maltreatment is a major public health concern in the United States. Children who have experienced maltreatment often suffer long-term consequences to their emotional and physical health, including an increased risk for mental and behavioral health issues as well as chronic and sometimes life-threatening conditions, such as heart and lung disease, diabetes, and certain forms of cancer. These consequences highlight the growing need for child welfare services and the increasing societal costs of these services.

  The journal Trauma, Violence, & Abuse published a special issue focusing on the need for primary prevention within a public health model, which centers on dealing with population-level or pervasive health concerns in a community-based, coordinated way. The articles in the issue address topics such as primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention programs designed specifically for younger children but that can also be applied to older children; a three-pronged approach to prevention that incorporates knowledge development, community engagement, and program sustainability; an evaluation of the Triple-P intervention; and the similarities between the fields of injury prevention and child maltreatment prevention and what can be learned for community-level interventions and child welfare engagement.

  The special issue, titled "The Public Health Model of Child Maltreatment Prevention" and edited by Todd I. Herrenkohl, Rebecca T. Leeb, and Daryl Higgins, is available at http://journals.sagepub.com/toc/tvaa/17/4.
   

• 2020: Building Communities of Hope

  2020: Building Communities of Hope

  Casey Family Programs launched the nationwide initiative 2020: Building Communities of Hope to improve the safety and success of children and their families and ultimately prevent entry into foster care.

  2020: Building Communities of Hope is based on four core principles:

  • Empower local leaders to stand at the helm of efforts to work with and strengthen families and communities to improve their outcomes
  • Improve the utilization of data to drive decision-making and increase the capacity of communities to support families in need
  • Change federal, state, tribal, and local funding structures to better support more effective investments in sustainable change, improve outcomes, and restore hope
  • Forge effective partnerships between the philanthropic and business communities and federal, state, tribal, and local governments to support long-lasting improvements for children and families

  This initiative focuses on the following goals:

  • Safely reduce the need for foster care by 50 percent by the year 2020 through partnerships with child welfare systems, families, policymakers, courts, and tribes to promote practices and policies that strengthen family resilience
  • Demonstrate how every child can have a safe and permanent family by improving foster care and related services
  • Support more effective investments in children and families by contributing nonpartisan information, data, and resources that will help public officials make informed, effective decisions for families
  • Encourage community collaboration to improve the long-term positive outcomes of children and their families

  The signature report on the initiative, The Evolution of Hope, details efforts in Gainesville, FL, and Johnson County, KY, to implement the initiative's ideals. Gainesville communities collaborated with Partnership for Strong Families—a community-based care lead agency serving Alachua County—and Casey Family Programs to open resource centers offering support and primary prevention services, such as parenting classes and job skills training, to families living in areas with historically high rates of verified child abuse and neglect. Data from 2009 to 2015 show promising results, with a 14-percent decrease in verified child abuse and neglect in Gainesville communities as a result of the services provided by these resource centers.

  In Johnson County (KY), the Department of Community Based Services partnered with Casey Family Programs to implement the Johnson County Community of Hope, which brings together social services agencies, the judicial system, community volunteers, mental health services agencies, substance use treatment agencies, public schools, the local library, and the business community. The goal of this initiative is to build stronger families and reduce the number of children in foster care and the number of child maltreatment cases. Since the start of the initiative, the number of children in foster care in Johnson County has dropped by about one-third.

  The Evolution of Hope is available at https://www.casey.org/hope2017/.
  To read more about 2020: Building Communities of Hope, visit https://www.casey.org/who-we-are/2020-building-communities-of-hope/.

• Funding Opportunity Announcement: Community Collaborations to Strengthen and Preserve Families

  Funding Opportunity Announcement: Community Collaborations to Strengthen and Preserve Families

  The Administration for Children and Families (ACF) released a funding opportunity announcement (FOA) —HHS-2018-ACF-ACYF-CA-1351: Community Collaborations to Strengthen and Preserve Families—to fund 5-year demonstration projects that support the development, implementation, and evaluation of strategies aimed at strengthening families, especially those at high risk for child maltreatment. The projects will seek to enhance community-based primary prevention and address specific site barriers in an effort to reduce the number of referrals to child welfare agencies.

  Read more about the FOA on the ACF website at https://ami.grantsolutions.gov/index.cfm?switch=foa&fon=HHS-2018-ACF-ACYF-CA-1351.
   

• The Need for a Primary Prevention-Focused Child Welfare System

  The Need for a Primary Prevention-Focused Child Welfare System

  Written by Jerry Milner.

  Everyone that reads this article is likely aware that our foster care population is continuing to rise. We are up to over 437,000 children in foster care, and the number is increasing every year. It is not all due to the opioid crisis. The vast majority of children come into foster care due to neglect, and most of the neglect is poverty related. We are also seeing yearly increases in the number of reports of child abuse and neglect—we are up to 4 million reports per year.

  These are not the trends or results that any of us would like to see. As a system, we are investing a considerable amount of money to achieve very poor results. In fact, our interventions often cause additional trauma when we separate children and families and perpetuate harmful cycles within families over generations. We have to call on ourselves as a nation to answer one very simple question: Why continue operating in a manner that is largely ineffective, expensive, and does not effectively strengthen the resilience of parents?

  We think there is an opportunity in child welfare to use our funding and our interventions to help families become more self-sufficient and to enhance parental protective factors so that parents have the capacity to care for their children in safe and healthy ways—without government interventions.

  The Family First Prevention and Services Act (FFPSA) helps highlight the need to focus on prevention by opening the door for states to receive federal support for certain prevention services for children who are identified as at imminent risk of entering foster care. This would typically mean that something has already happened, that a child has been injured in some way, and that some trauma has already occurred. While the new tool of FFPSA will be helpful in preventing some foster care placement, shouldn't we be most concerned and invested in doing all that we can to prevent the imminent risk—the injury and trauma—from ever happening in the first place?

  While FFPSA allows states to buy evidence-based clinical services for limited time periods, filling an important gap in the prevention continuum, many families need basic concrete supports (rent assistance, legal assistance, housing, food, etc.) and relational supports (mentoring, peer support, etc.) in order to avoid formal child welfare involvement. Also, all families in the child welfare system do not suffer from substance use or mental health problems but are in the child welfare system due to homelessness or housing insecurity, domestic violence, parents transitioning from incarceration, unresolved trauma from their own childhoods, and social isolation.

  Many states that have operated under a title IV-E waiver have taken important steps to focus on primary prevention to strengthen families and help avoid children and families from ever becoming at imminent risk of separation. Such upfront investments in families and communities are showing very promising results. We encourage all jurisdictions to consider what you may be able to do with your system partners (both traditional and nontraditional) to strengthen families and reduce the likelihood that maltreatment ever occurs. There are great examples happening all around the country. In addition to this edition of CBX, please stay tuned for an information memorandum from the Children's Bureau that will highlight some of the great primary prevention work I've seen around the country over the past year. We would like to do everything we can to support such efforts.
   

• Child Welfare Practice Within the Context of Public-Private Partnerships

  Child Welfare Practice Within the Context of Public-Private Partnerships

  An article in Social Work discusses how child welfare practice operates within a partnership between public agencies, which have a statutory mandate to provide child welfare services, and private organizations, which provide a variety of services informally or through contracts. According to the article, "Child Welfare Practice Within the Context of Public-Private Partnerships," results from a recent national survey of private child-serving agencies showed that 89 percent of them had contracts with public institutions for services such as family preservation, foster care case management, and congregate care. In addition, federal policies, such as the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997, the Fostering Connections to Success and Increasing Adoptions Act of 2008, and the Child and Family Services Improvement and Innovation Act of 2011, have raised accountability expectations for agencies to meet federal benchmarks for service delivery in order to keep their federal funding, underscoring the need for interorganizational trust and collaboration.

  The article reviews current literature to answer the following questions:

  • How should public and private child welfare relationships and contracting procedures be structured to provide effective service delivery?
  • How can performance measurement and management systems be developed to promote child safety, permanency, and well-being?
  • How can managers help promote effective and culturally appropriate services?

  The article suggests developing a shared mission for service planning, clarifying the roles of both public and private frontline staff, and coordinating day-to-day communication and service activities as the best ways to promote the well-being of children and families involved in child welfare.

  "Child Welfare Practice Within the Context of Public-Private Partnerships," by Crystal Collins-Camargo and Bowen McBeath (Social Work, 62), is available at https://academic.oup.com/sw/article-abstract/62/2/130/2972113?redirectedFrom=fulltext.

• Engaging Communities

  Engaging Communities

  The National Child Abuse and Neglect Technical Assistance and Strategic Dissemination Center (CANTASD), a service of the Children's Bureau, has a webpage that focuses on engaging communities in preventing child abuse and neglect and supporting families involved in child welfare. The webpage includes a spotlight on publications, practice tools, Digital Dialogs, and descriptions of initiatives highlighting community engagement.

  Examples of resources currently featured on the page include the following:

  • "From the Field: Community Approaches to Toxic Stress"—This article summarizes a Digital Dialog with Cailin O'Connor from the Center for the Study of Social Policy. The dialog centered on understanding toxic stress and how it impacts young children as well as the need to move beyond an individual focus to a systemic focus based on environmental and community contexts.
  • "Engaging Business and Other Partners in Child Abuse and Neglect Prevention Approaches"—This Digital Dialog stresses the importance of partnering with the business community in cross-sector networks for primary prevention.
  • "Fostering Hope Initiative"—This video highlights the Fostering Hope Initiative, a neighborhood-based initiative in central Oregon. Fostering Hope is designed to promote the positive development of children, strengthen families, and build community through neighborhood and community supports and services.

  Visit the webpage at http://www.cantasd.org/explore-topics/engaging-communities/ to find more resources for community engagement.
   

• Improving Child Welfare Outcomes: Balancing Investments in Prevention and Treatment

  Improving Child Welfare Outcomes: Balancing Investments in Prevention and Treatment

  Child maltreatment and subsequent involvement in the child welfare system can have far-reaching negative effects on children and youth that can last into adulthood, increasing their risk for financial instability, involvement in the criminal justice system, substance use, and homelessness. In addition, child maltreatment and its related prevention and treatment services can cost society approximately $80 billion annually.

  A report produced by the RAND Corporation discusses a study in which researchers used a model to simulate maltreatment and its detection; describe the movement of children through the child welfare system; estimate the societal costs of providing prevention, treatment, and kinship care; and estimate how maltreatment and contact with the child welfare system affect outcomes in early adulthood in order to determine how to focus policies to achieve the best outcomes.

  Researchers focused on the following three decision points in the model:

  • Preventive services to keep children from entering foster care because of maltreatment
  • Family preservation treatment services designed to provide services and supports aimed at keeping families together
  • Kinship care treatment efforts to support kinship caregivers

  These decision points affected the number of children involved in the child welfare system, how they moved through the system, their outcomes, and the costs of the services provided.

  The study findings include the following:

  • Expanding both prevention and treatment efforts in the simulation model led to a reduction in maltreatment and the number of children entering care, improvement in children's experiences moving through the child welfare system, improvement in outcomes in young adulthood, and a reduction in total lifetime expenditures on preventive and child welfare services.
  • Combining expanded prevention and treatment services in the form of support for kinship care led to a net cost reduction of 3 to 7 percent (or approximately $5.2 billion to $10.5 billion saved) of total lifetime spending for the group of children studied.
  • Combining prevention, treatment, and kinship care efforts led to reduced maltreatment, improved children's experiences in the system, improved outcomes, and reduced expenditures.

  Improving Child Welfare Outcomes: Balancing Investments in Prevention and Treatment is available at https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1700/RR1775-1/RAND_RR1775-1.pdf (1,680 KB).
  
  

  Related Item

  How the Child-Welfare System Could Protect More Kids and Save Billions of Dollars (RAND, https://www.rand.org/blog/rand-review/2018/04/how-the-child-welfare-system-could-protect-more-kids.html).