Data as a Tool for Creating Racial Equity
This article from the summer 2021 issue of Kansas Child focuses on the use of data as a tool for creating racial equity.
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Bridging the Divide between Child Welfare and Home Visiting Systems to Address the Needs of Pregnant and Parenting Youth in Care
Article February 21, 2025
This article presents findings from an implementation study of a pilot project that connected pregnant and parenting youth in care with home visiting services. It draws primarily on semistructured interviews conducted with the practitioners who delivered those services and the parents who received them. We find that home visiting services can be delivered successfully to pregnant and parenting youth in care and that both practitioners and parents reported that parents benefit from those services. We also find that engaging and delivering services to pregnant and parenting youth in care presents substantial challenges and that home visiting programs sometimes deviated from their standard practices in response. The study has implications for future efforts to provide home visiting services to pregnant and parenting youth in care or to other families involved in the child welfare system.
Dear Child Welfare Colleague Letter from ACF
Report February 21, 2025
The Children's Bureau (CB) within the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) is committed to fostering a child welfare system that is focused on supporting families. The Family First Prevention Services Act (FFPSA) and its title IV-E prevention program provides a watershed opportunity to create more equitable outcomes for children, youth, and families before they face the tumult and devastating consequences of maltreatment and separation. The ACF has worked diligently to support jurisdictions as they develop, submit, revise, and implement prevention plans, and we are continuously examining how to streamline processes and improve supports. This letter includes resources to aid jurisdictions as they develop their plans, including links to prevention plans that have been approved, sample program plans, resources for tribes, and responses to policy questions.
Accelerating the Expansion of Home Visiting Services Under the Family First Prevention Services Act
Report February 21, 2025
The Family First Prevention Services Act of 2018 (Family First) was intended to redirect a portion of federal child welfare funding to early intervention and prevention. Six years later, multiple barriers still stand in the way of expanding families’ access to support services such as voluntary home visiting. Key challenges include building cross-agency agreements, navigating administrative practices, and aligning funding streams. The goal of this paper is to expedite the expansion of home visiting services under Family First by elevating strategies developed by states to address financing system misalignment between child welfare and home visiting. In many cases, use of Family First resources to support home visiting requires braiding funds to cover start-up costs, adapting child welfare vendor contracts and payment approaches to account for variability in services and cover the full cost of providing home visits, and collaboration between agencies that may not be accustomed to communicating with each other and working together. We hope this paper enables additional states to expand home visiting more rapidly to more families, promoting safer, happier, and healthier lives together