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July 2024| Issue 20
The Grantee Connection is a quarterly digest featuring new and noteworthy products, information, and lessons learned from select Children's Bureau discretionary grants to inform research, capacity building, and program improvement efforts.
Featured Grantees
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Project Description: The National Quality Improvement Center on Family-Centered Reunification (QIC-R) is funded by the Children’s Bureau and operated by the Innovations Institute within the University of Connecticut School of Social Work. It aims to support the timely, stable, and lasting reunification of families with children in foster care. The QIC-R focuses on identifying and addressing systemic barriers and racial disparities that may hinder family reunification, offering extensive resources and training for agencies to support these efforts.
Project Highlight: The QIC-R and its team of child welfare experts and consultants recently developed a best practice assessment tool to assist local implementation sites funded through the QIC-R to provide family-centered reunification support for parents whose children have been removed and placed into the foster care system. The Family-Centered Reunification Best Practice Assessment Tool was designed to help remove barriers to preparing families for reunification and add to a foundation of evidence-based best practice. Although there are consistent and well-disseminated findings regarding what works to support successful reunification, actual practice does not always reflect best practices. Child welfare professionals can utilize the tool to help families receive the resources they need, and programs can use it as a tool to guide reunification practices to promote reasonable efforts and successful transitions for families.
The QIC-R is seeking interested child welfare agency partners to pilot the Family-Centered Reunification Best Practice Assessment Tool and allow the QIC-R team to evaluate the outcome of the pilot. To request a copy of the tool, please email qicreunification@uconn.edu.
Learn More: To find more information and resources on preserving, nurturing, and enhancing parent-child relationships and supportive community connections to support the successful reunification of families, visit the QIC-R website.
Graphic Provided by QIC-R
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Helping Sites Provide Comprehensive Programming to Meet the Needs of Adoptive and Guardianship Families
Project Description: The National Center for Enhanced Post-Adoption Support (Post-Adoption Center) was funded in 2023 through a 5-year cooperative agreement between Spaulding for Children and the Children's Bureau. It provides free universal and onsite technical assistance to states, tribal nations, and territories seeking to develop, implement, and sustain comprehensive postpermanency services. Each year, the Post-Adoption Center will partner with five sites to provide onsite technical assistance to enhance their postpermanency continuum and services for families with more intensive needs.
Project Highlight: The Post-Adoption Center's resource library contains hundreds of resources related to postpermanency supports and services, including its Post-Permanency Model Program Manual. This manual outlines the postpermanency programs that the Post-Adoption Center sites may want to adopt in order to support adoptive and guardianship families with more significant needs. It can help sites understand the model, compare it to their system and identify where they can make enhancements.
Other resources in the library focus on topics such as outreach and engagement, evaluation of postpermanency programs, protective and risk factors, funding postpermanency services, discontinuity and instability, and other foundational information. There are also resources specific to providing adoption and guardianship support to diverse populations and communities, including American Indian/Alaska Native populations, culturally diverse families, and kinship families. In the summer, the Post-Adoption Center will be adding site profiles, which will provide a summary of postpermanency services available in each state.
If visitors to the website are unable to find what they are looking for in the resource library, personalized assistance is available from Post-Adoption Center staff. The center also offers webinars, center chats, and peer groups to help connect child welfare professionals with one another around postpermanency-related matters.
Learn More: View the Post-Adoption Center website to learn more about enhancing and supporting your state's postpermanency services, find and register for events, and sign up for the listserv.
Graphic provided by The National Center for Enhanced Post-Adoption Support
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Understanding and Improving Court Processes
Project Description: The Capacity Building Center for Courts, part of the Children's Bureau's Child Welfare Capacity Building Collaborative, focuses on building the capacity of court improvement programs to improve child welfare practice in the courts and legal community.
Project Highlight: The Center for Courts created the resource Examining the Child and Family Services Review Outcomes and Systemic Factors: Legal and Judicial Perspective to help states consider the legal aspects of the seven outcomes and seven systemic factors assessed in the Child and Family Services Review (CFSR). This resource presents the legal and judicial connections between 36 items within the CFSR outcomes and factors to illustrate possible legal practice and policy issues. This resource further connects the legal and judicial considerations within the CFSR items to the Judicial, Court, and Attorney Measures of Performance (JCAMP), which is a set of model measures for child welfare court processes. Courts and other legal organizations can use JCAMP to collect, track, understand, and improve practices over time. The measures build on and complement existing court and CFSR measures and can be adapted to site-specific priorities, measurement goals, and differing data capacities.
Learn More: Visit the JCAMP webpage to find detailed how-to guides and other resources to help you implement the measures most relevant to your state or local needs.
Graphic provided by the Center for Courts
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Authentic Engagement of Youth and Young Adults in System Change
Project Description: The Quality Improvement Center on Engaging Youth in Finding Permanency (QIC-EY) is charged with advancing child welfare practice to ensure that programs are authentically engaging and empowering children and youth involved in the child welfare system, especially in relation to permanency decisions. The QIC-EY will work with project pilot sites to implement policy, practice, and culture shifts to intentionally create systemic changes in how children and youth are authentically engaged.
Project Highlight: In an effort to share fundamental insights about the engagement of children and youth, especially in relation to permanency decisions, the QIC-EY has created a Lessons Learned series. In each discussion, the QIC-EY features products and exclusive content that highlight the insights and knowledge gained as the QIC-EY project progresses.
Lessons Learned #6 discusses how child welfare agencies should thoroughly assess their organizational capacities and practices as they seek to enhance engagement with children and youth. This process begins with evaluating concrete resources, organizational structure, knowledge and skills, culture, and partnerships. It involves multiple partners, including professionals, youth with lived experience, and agency partners, to identify strengths, gaps, and opportunities.
The QIC-EY identified the following organizational capacities as the most urgent to assess and elevate:
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Concrete resources (time, money, technology)
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Organizational structure and processes
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Engagement and partnership
Lessons Learned #6 features Shondra Marshall, the QIC-EY site implementation manager, who shares key insights into her experience with agency assessment.
Learn More: View the QIC-EY's Lessons Learned webpage to gain fundamental insights about engaging children and youth, especially around permanency. Additionally, the QIC-EY NOW tool offers real-life stories about authentic engagement. It includes examples and quick tips for busy professionals, highlighting the competencies and characteristics that drive authentic engagement.
Photo provided by QIC-EY
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Grantee Blog:
Information and Access to Build Kinship Connections
Wayfinder Family Services is currently facilitating a 3-year demonstration project, Kinnections, which is funded through the Children's Bureau's Family Connection Grants: Building the Evidence for Kinship Navigator Programs grant cluster. The Kinnections project is a multiagency partnership between Wayfinder and the California Department of Social Services, five California county child welfare agencies (Butte, Placer, Sacramento, Santa Cruz, and Sonoma Counties), the Children's Bureau, and Child Trends. Its purpose is to build credible evidence of the effectiveness of Wayfinder's kinship navigator program in supporting kin caregivers, contribute to the research reviewed by the Title IV-E Prevention Services Clearinghouse, and create a pathway for title IV-E funding for states that are implementing kinship navigator programs.
The Kinnections project demonstrates that kinship navigator programs provide a vital lifeline to kin caregivers, improving information about and access to needed resources, reducing caregiver stress, and promoting family stability, protective factors, and well-being. Wayfinder's Kinnections staff assist both formal and informal kin caregivers in learning about, locating, and utilizing services to meet the needs of the children they are raising. A critical component of Kinnections is the meaningful connection of kin caregivers and youth with an experienced provider who can offer support in a family-centered, strength-based, and trauma-informed context.
Child Trends' evaluation of Kinnections is designed to investigate whether kin caregivers' well-being, access and referral to services, and satisfaction with programs and services, as well as their kinship children's placement stability, improves because of receiving services from a Kinnections kinship navigator. The evaluation includes surveys of kin caregivers when they first request services (treatment counties) or when they first hear about the study (comparison counties) and then again 4 months later (both groups).
As of May 15, 2024, 274 kinship caregivers were enrolled in the five treatment counties and receiving Kinnections services, and 214 kin caregivers were enrolled in the eight comparison counties and receiving services as usual in their counties.
The project plans to continue data collection through the end of January 2025 and synthesize and disseminate findings by May 2025.
Photo provided by Wayfinder Family Services
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Resources From
Equitable Practice
Visit the webpage.
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Protecting the Rights and Providing Appropriate Services to LGBTQIA2S+ Youth in Out-of-Home Care
Read the publication.
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"Episode 76: Building Parenting Skills to Address Trauma, Grief and Mental Health"
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Grantee News & Updates
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Address inequity and turnover in the child welfare workforce by reading the Center for Workforce Equity and Leadership's practical blog on its new website.
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The Center for Native Child and Family Resilience recently completed a series of webpages on lessons learned in the course of its work. These lessons learned highlight how adjusting practices, behavior, language, and attitudes led to better results for the center, its partners, and the communities it worked with.
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Interested in supporting the Children's Bureau discretionary grant process? Apply today to be a grant reviewer!
Are you a Children's Bureau grant recipient? Submit your updates and resources!
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