Story Collection Enhances Family and Community Well-Being

Project Description: Family Strong is a 5-year cooperative agreement funded in 2021 under Family Support Through Primary Prevention. The project is implemented and evaluated through a partnership between the University of Kansas Center for Public Partnerships and Research, the Kansas Department for Children and Families, the Family Resource Center of Crawford County, Kansas Legal Services, and the Kansas Children’s Service League. The primary goal of Family Strong is to support all families and provide them with the help they need to thrive within their Southeast Kansas communities. Family Strong strives to normalize seeking and receiving help within a family-centered community service network. By connecting networks for improved service delivery and supporting help-seeking, Family Strong invests in the community to provide supports to families in crisis rather than reporting them to traditional, reactive child protection systems. Families with lived expertise are the project’s core—their perspectives are essential to implementing Family Strong.

Project Highlight: During the previous quarter, University of Kansas leadership, in collaboration with the Family Strong steering committee, created and launched an online story collection platform for family and community well-being. Stories are submitted by families, providers, or even people without children. These stories help state and local leaders better serve children and families by learning directly from families about what affects them and what is important to them. Members of the steering committee and other statewide partners have been utilizing the platform to share their stories about living in their community and the families they work alongside. Story collection materials have been translated into Spanish and Marshallese and are provided to project partners who have established trusting relationships among these underrepresented communities. These populations are generally hard to reach, often guarded, and frequently prefer social services to not work alongside their family. Individuals they do trust within social services can share the platform and materials to encourage them to share their stories.

Story Collection will be ongoing and be paired with community sensemaking sessions across the region and community groups throughout the project. Sensemaking allows community members to interpret data, give meaning to their collective experiences, and arrive at community-driven actions for improving well-being.

Learn More: For more information about Story Collection, visit https://cppr.ku.edu/ourtomorrows.  

Graphic provided by Family Strong

Collaborative Response to Reduce Prenatal Substance Exposure

Project Description: Healthy Connections for Moms and Babies, through Broward Health Start Coalition, is a 5-year Regional Partnership Grant Round 7 grantee that was funded in 2022. The project uses evidence-based early interventions to engage pregnant women who use substances with peer navigation services to ultimately improve outcomes for pregnant women, their babies, and their families. It is a systemwide effort to reduce the harm associated with in-utero substance exposure while decreasing the overall number of exposed newborns and associated removals. The project strives to avert child welfare system involvement and create a pathway for a healthier mom, baby, and family.

Project Highlight:  The Bringing Babies Home Healthy Task Force in Broward County, FL, identified a need for education and stigma reduction about medicated assisted treatment (MAT) for pregnant and parenting people. A collective values inventory was sent out and completed by over 200 people within the network. Responses received indicated concerns that MAT for pregnant and parenting people could be harmful, such as replacing one drug for another and that it could be harmful to the baby.

Since September is National Recovery Month, the task force created an event for their network to come together and "Unite 4 Recovery." The county's new Recovery Community Center hosted the event for pregnant and parenting people. It featured two doctors from Broward County’s Mothers in Recovery program who are knowledgeable about prescribing MAT for pregnant and parenting individuals. They provided information to reduce stigma and further educate the community. There was also a mother who utilized MAT while pregnant and parenting through the Mothers in Recovery program, who is now a certified recovery peer specialist, sharing her recovery story. The Recovery Community Center is inviting the community to create an empowered network of support for families to explore the positive impacts that MAT options have on pregnant and postpartum people. The program will welcome genuine stories and remain open to the numerous possibilities and paths to recovery!

Learn More: To learn more about community initiatives and resources for parents and professionals, visit Broward Healthy Start Coalition.

Photo provided by Broward Healthy Start Coalition

Enhancing Child Care With Trauma-Informed Training and System Improvements

Project Description:  The Child Welfare Early Education Partnership (CWEEP) funded under Building Early Childhood-Child Welfare Partnerships to Support the Well-Being of Young Children, Families and Caregivers and operated by Family Support Services of North Florida in Jacksonville, FL. The Project focuses on sustaining a strategic, multisystem collaboration between child welfare, early care and education, and other key partners. CWEEP seeks to expand its collaborative network, increase enrollment in Early Head Start and Head Start programs, and enroll more children aged 0–5 involved with the child welfare system in quality childcare centers. Additionally, CWEEP works to improve access to high-quality childcare and build the capacity of early care providers, child welfare professionals, foster and kinship caregivers, birth and adoptive parents, and the judiciary to effectively meet the needs of infants and children in the child welfare system.

Project Highlight: Training is a key component of the CWEEP grant. To reduce suspensions and expulsions in childcare settings, CWEEP hosted and invited several childcare providers to participate in training on an attachment-based, trauma-informed intervention, Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI), to meet the complex needs of vulnerable children. By the end of September 2024, this training will have been offered to over 60 childcare providers. In December, these providers will have the opportunity to become certified in positive discipline, one of the components of TBRI. This certification will enable them to share their knowledge and help their centers become more trauma responsive. 

Identifying system gaps is a key focus. For instance, CWEEP revitalized the Drop-in Center program, which provides caregivers with access to a list of childcare providers who offer immediate enrollment for up to three days in emergencies, such as disruptions, lapses in childcare, or when preferred childcare is unavailable. A recent meeting found a gap in the referral and enrollment process for children entering childcare after being removed from their caregivers. To address this, the CWEEP Navigator now handles all childcare referrals for children aged 6 weeks to 12 years. They also submit monthly reports to ensure timely referrals and prevent service lapses for children in both nonjudicial and judicial programs.

Learn More: Visit the Family Support Services of North Florida’s website to learn more about the programs and services. 

Graphic provided by Family Support Services of North Florida

Empowering Kansas Communities with Innovative Family Resource Center Pilots

Project Description: Kansas Linking Infrastructure for Nurturing Kids (KAN-LINK) is a 3-year project, funded in 2023 under Building Early Childhood-Child Welfare Partnerships to Support the Well-Being of Young Children, Families and Caregivers, developed by the Kansas Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund in partnership with the Kansas Department for Children and Families. KAN-LINK seeks to improve coordination, collaboration, alignment, and infrastructure between the Kansas early care and education (ECE) systems and the network of child abuse prevention and foster care providers at the state and local levels. KAN-LINK’s goals are to promote access to a robust and interconnected network of comprehensive ECE services and supports to help children in Kansas thrive in their communities.

Project Highlight: KAN-LINK uses a unique local approach that mobilizes community-led innovation labs to test and address local policies, practices, and infrastructure through a network of family resource centers (FRC). In year 1 of the grant, KAN-LINK partnered with three FRC locations across Kansas to identify local priorities, create pilots for testing and scaling, and begin implementing the pilot projects. Each FRC partner engaged local individuals with lived experience who have accessed family support in the community to explore local needs for each community and created pilot projects that respond to these priorities. The following are examples of pilot projects:

• Creating an ECE referral workflow through the local hospital, obstetrician, gynecological, and pediatrician offices to engage families in a support system through the FRC from the prenatal phase through 5 years old
• Strengthening the referral system between insurance navigation and ECE services by providing a screening tool for families at the point of seeking insurance assistance
• Strengthening access to ECE support by introducing an early screening tool for siblings administered at preschool and Kindergarten enrollment

In addition to supporting the existing pilots, in year 2, KAN-LINK will partner with two more FRCs to create and launch pilots in Kansas communities.

Learn More: To learn more about early childhood work and family well-being in Kansas, visit the Kansas Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund website. Visit the Family Resource Centers funded by the Kansas Department for Children and Families to see how the agency supports families.   

Graphic provided by Kansas Children’s Cabinet and Trust Fund

Enhancing Child Welfare Workforce with Data Analytics and Real-World Interventions

Project Description: The Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Analytics (QIC-WA) was established in 2023 to bring tools to public and tribal child welfare agencies to improve the usefulness of workforce data. It is committed to addressing persistent child welfare workforce challenges with data-driven solutions. QIC-WA believes that agencies that effectively use their workforce data to improve operations are best suited to support children and families. QIC-WA strives to meet organizations where they are and better equip them to use their data to determine workforce strategies regarding diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging; recruitment; performance; retention; well-being; and more.

Project Highlight: QIC-WA recently selected and announced two tribal and four public child welfare agencies with whom to build data analytics capacity and test real-world workforce interventions. Reliable resources to strengthen the child welfare workforce will also be developed and curated. For example, the website features a workforce analytics application that allows workforce leaders to enter their data to generate a snapshot of tenure and turnover or recruitment and selection metrics and visualizations. Child welfare organizations have a lot of data and recognize that they may need additional support to make the data more useful.

Learn More: Visit the QIC-WA website, follow on LinkedIn, and subscribe to the newsletter to stay informed about work with sites and to access the latest information to support data-driven workforce decision-making.

Graphic provided by the Quality Improvement Center for Workforce Analytics

National Adoption Month

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Providing Background Information on Children to Prospective Adoptive Parents

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"Tribal Courts and Child Welfare: Being Family-Centered" (Episode 39)

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